“The Andorian Incident”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga and Fred Dekker
Directed by Roxann Dawson
Season 1, Episode 7
Production episode 007
Original air date: October 31, 2001
Date: June 19, 2151
Captain’s star log. Enterprise is passing near a planet called P’Jem, which houses a three-thousand-year-old Vulcan monastery where monks undergo the kolinahr ritual to purge all emotions. Archer would like to visit, and T’Pol agrees, though the conditions under which they can go down, and the rituals they must follow, are lengthy and complex, causing Archer to snidely comment to Tucker, “And I thought Starfleet training was tough.”
They take a shuttlepod down, and there are several things that make the landing party—especially T’Pol—uneasy. The door has been bashed in and there’s broken pottery on the floor. However, the elder who greets them says that sometimes the work of purging emotions results in violent outbursts. But another red flag for T’Pol is the fact that the elder is alone in the atrium, which is surprising and unusual.
In the reflection of a vase, Archer sites a blue-skinned alien hiding behind a wall. Once he exposes the alien, the jig is up, and the other aliens show up with rifles brandished: these are Andorians. They have been in conflict with the Vulcans for some time, though there is currently a treaty. The Andorians are convinced that P’Jem is hiding a sensor array that is being used to spy on Andoria. The Vulcans insist there is no working technology anywhere on this world.
Archer, T’Pol, and Tucker are brought to a room where the other Vulcan monks are being held prisoner. The elder explains that this is the third time the Andorians have come to search P’Jem, and found nothing. Enterprise’s arrival is unfortunate, as it only flames the paranoia of Shran, the Andorian commander. Shran tortures Archer for information on how and why he’s collaborating with the Vulcans, his insistence that he’s pretty much just here as a tourist falling on deaf antennae. Shran also smashes all three Starfleet communicators, after warning Reed that any attempt to land more troops on the planet will be met with violence.
The elder says there’s an old transmitter in the catacombs, which are hidden. There’s a secret passage to the catacombs, which the Vulcans hadn’t used for reasons that aren’t clear, though the implication is that the expectation that the Andorians will leave once they don’t find anything, so the Vulcans are just going to wait them out. The transmitter is busted, but Tucker is confident in his ability to fix it.
Buy the Book
Until the Last of Me
Sure enough, he puts it back together again and contacts Enterprise, giving Reed orders to wait. Reed is not happy about that at all.
Tucker saw a pattern of three lights in one of the catacomb walls that he thinks is near the atrium, and Archer wonders if that’s light coming through the eyes and mouth of a relief sculpture of a face that’s in one of the atrium walls.
Testing the theory, he allows himself to be questioned further by Shran, providing them with such useful “information” as the fact that 70% of the organisms on Earth are bacteria, that someone in Canton, Ohio rolled a ball of string six meters in diameter, and that astronomer Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel. While being beaten up for his effrontery, he surreptitiously tosses a statuette through one of the holes in relief face. Tucker catches it on the other side.
Reed beams down to the catacombs with a security team, setting charges behind the atrium wall. A running firefight soon ensues, with Andorians and Starfleet trading phase-pistol fire while the elder bitches that they’ve turned a sanctuary into a war zone. However, inside the reliquary they uncover a huge metal door, which turns out to hide the very listening post the Andorians accused the Vulcans of hiding. Oops.
A furious Archer insists that T’Pol give her hand-scanner to Shran, so the Andorians can have evidence that the Vulcans broke the treaty. T’Pol hesitates for a moment, but not only gives Shran the scanner, but also borrows Reed’s communicator and orders Enterprise to let the Andorian ship leave P’Jem unmolested. Shran tells Archer that the Andorians are in his debt.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? A security guard is reluctant to go through the transporter, as he’s “heard stories, sir—it might not be safe.” Good thing he hasn’t seen The Motion Picture…
The gazelle speech. Archer is very eager to visit the monastery on P’Jem and learn more about Vulcan culture, which is a nice change from his usual attitude toward Vulcans.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol has been using a nasal numbing agent to deal with how stinky humans are to Vulcan noses.
Florida Man. Florida Man Fixes Alien Radio In Record Time.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox has a pointed conversation with T’Pol in the mess hall, reminding her that her reluctance to visit P’Jem is not only at odds with Enterprise′s mission statement, but also with the Vulcan philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… Vulcan High Command has hidden a long-range sensor array beneath the temple on P’Jem, which is in not only in violation of the Andorian treaty, but also in violation of the Vulcan philosophy of not lying. It’s not clear if the entire monastery is in on it or just the elder and the one snotty initiate.
Also Archer notices that a protostar that they looked at recently isn’t on the star charts Vulcan provided them, meaning they may be incomplete…
Blue meanies. The Andorians and the Vulcans are in a cold war of sorts, and the Andorians are convinced that P’Jem is hiding a long-range sensor array—rightly, as it turns out.
Andorian makeup has been redesigned since it was last seen on TNG (in “The Offspring“), as for the first time, their antennae are articulated.
More on this later… The Andorians were established as important members of the Federation in the original series’ “Journey to Babel,” and were seen in “Whom Gods Destroy,” “Yesteryear,” “The Time Trap,” and The Voyage Home, and referenced periodically in the spinoffs. This episode provides humans’ first contact with the species.
Also Reed bitches that landing parties checking in regularly and scanning for alien ships when entering orbit should be standard procedure, which it will be, as seen on all the other shows…
I’ve got faith…
“You say this is a place to purge emotions? Looks like somebody had to purge pretty bad—he bashed the door in.”
–Tucker upon seeing the sanctuary door, which was actually bashed in by Andorians.
Welcome aboard. Lots of familiar faces in this one. We’ve got Bruce French as the elder; he previously played a Betazoid in TNG’s “The Drumhead,” an Ocampa in Voyager’s “Caretaker,” and a Son’a in Insurrection. We’ve got Steven Dennis as Tholos; he previously played aliens in Voyager’s “Night,” “Think Tank,” and “Warhead,” as well as an Equinox crew member in the “Equinox” two-parter. We’ve got Jeff Ricketts as Keval; he previously played the Axanar captain in “Fight or Flight.” We’ve got Jamie McShane as the security guard; he will be back on Picard in the recurring role of Zhaban.
And, the biggie, we’ve got the great Jeffrey Combs as Shran, a role that will continue to recur throughout the series. It’s his third recurring role on Trek, having also played Brunt and Weyoun on multiple episodes of DS9, and he also played Tiron in DS9’s “Meridian,” Mulkahey in DS9’s “Far Beyond the Stars,” and Penk in Voyager’s “Tsunkatse,” and will go on to play Krem in “Acquisition” and AGIMUS in Lower Decks’s “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie.”
Combs, Ricketts, and Dennis will all return in “Shadows of P’Jem.”
In addition, Richard Tanner plays the smarmy initiate.
Trivial matters: The events of this episode will be followed up on in “Shadows of P’Jem.” P’Jem will continue to be referenced several more times on the show, and is also seen in the games Star Trek Online and Fleet Command, and in your humble rewatcher’s novel A Singular Destiny.
That Vulcan and Andoria were in proximate star systems was first established in DS9’s “In the Pale Moonlight.”
The ritual of kolinahr was first seen in The Motion Picture, when Spock tried and failed it. Tuvok was also established as having undergone the ritual earlier in life in Voyager‘s “Flashback.”
The Vulcan motto of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations was first mentioned on the original series’ “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”
Archer mentions Surak, established in the original series’ “The Savage Curtain” as the founder of Vulcans’ philosophy of logic and suppressing emotions, where an image of him was played by Barry Atwater. Surak will be seen in “The Forge” and “Awakening,” played by Bruce Gray.
Tholos makes some snotty comments about Vulcan mating rituals, including a rather simplistic description of the kal-if-fee ritual during the pon farr, as seen in the original series’ “Amok Time” and Voyager’s “Blood Fever.”
Reed is established as being next in the chain of command following Archer, T’Pol, and Tucker.
This is the first of ten episodes of Enterprise directed by Roxann Dawson, who played B’Elanna Torres on Voyager, and who has gone on to be a hugely in-demand TV director over the past two decades.
While Archer’s trivia about bacteria and Tycho Brahe are true, we must assume that the person in Canton who made the six-meter twine ball did so between 2001 and 2151, as there is no such gigunda twine ball on record coming from that city. (The largest ball of twine in terms of diameter currently is a twelve-and-a-half-meter one in Branson, Missouri.)
It’s been a long road… “Don’t get your antennas in a twist.” All right, let’s take care of the (pink?) elephant in the room first: the worst thing about this episode, and every subsequent episode in which the Andorians appear on Enterprise, is the use of the epithet “pink-skin” to refer to humans. Every time I heard Jeffrey Combs use it, I winced like a big giant wincing thing. Yes, he only had the two points of reference in Archer and Tucker, but still. I mean, Crayola changed their “flesh-colored” crayon to peach in 1962, you’d think the producers of Enterprise could find an epithet that didn’t signal that the only humans who matter are the white folks forty years later.
That aside, this is a fantastic episode of Enterprise, doing exactly the sort of thing a prequel can do well. One of the running background themes of Trek—which is, admittedly, a byproduct of it being a show made on this actual planet—is that humans are the center of the Federation. Earth is the Federation’s capital, and Earth comes across as the guiding force.
Episodes like this lean into that sometimes unconscious tendency by making it a feature rather than a bug: throughout the course of Enterprise, we’ll see humans being the ones who bring people together, and it starts here with Archer caught in the middle of a heretofore unknown conflict between Vulcan and Andoria.
In fact, the conflict is with a heretofore unknown species. Despite them being stellar next-door neighbors to Vulcans, who have been mentoring humans for the better part of a century now, there’s been seemingly no contact whatsoever between humans and Andorians in that time. Archer finds himself caught between a rock and a hard place, as the Vulcans are accusing him of messing up the situation (Shran and the gang probably would have left before long if Enterprise hadn’t shown up) and Shran is torturing him to give up secrets that he doesn’t actually have.
Which makes his outrage at the end all the more palpable, because he’s been assuming that the Vulcans are telling the truth, that they really are monks living without technology, so to have the rug pulled out from under him is devastating.
And in the end, he not only does the right thing, but he also takes a step in making Earth a player in galactic politics, and not just a planet being mentored by the Vulcans. We know what the long-term endgame is—Andorians were introduced as members of the Federation, after all, way back in 1967, so we know that there will be peace among these three worlds a century hence—but having it start out as a contentious relationship gives the stories somewhere to go, and the arc of how the Andorians and Vulcans and humans all come to a rapprochement will be one of the more compelling storylines of the series moving forward. Indeed, the most appealing aspect of doing a prequel like this is to sow the seeds of what we know will come later, but it’s a philosophy the show only embraced every once in a while, at least prior to the final season.
The actual plot here is a pretty straightforward hostage story, though it does fall victim to the same thing that every TV show and movie ever falls victim to, that being people being imprisoned with no surveillance or guards. It makes no sense, none, that Shran wouldn’t leave a guard with the prisoners, but if he did, the plot falls apart, since they can’t go into their secret passageway if there’s an Andorian in the room. (At least the lack of technology in the monastery explains the lack of electronic surveillance…)
But what makes the bog-standard plot work, beyond how it fits into the overall tale of humans’ first stumbling out into what will eventually become Federation space, is the acting. Archer’s genuine desire to visit the monastery is well played by Scott Bakula, as is his outrage when the sensor array is revealed, and it’s a mode that is more appealing for the character than the borderline racism toward Vulcans we’ve gotten up until now. John Billingsley does a lovely job in his only scene reminding T’Pol of what’s important in his usual effacing, friendly manner. Dominic Keating does a nice job with Reed’s exasperated efficiency. And, as always, Jeffrey Combs is magnificent in portraying Shran’s fury, which turns out to be a righteous one in the end.
But the best performance is the very restrained one given by Jolene Blalock. She subtly plays her lack of comfort with visiting P’Jem when Archer brings it up, and she lays it on thick with the detailed instructions on how to approach the monks in an obvious attempt to intimidate.
Where she knocks it out of the park, though, are in two scenes. First when Archer questions her loyalty, and she tartly reminds him that she has never disobeyed an order of his—and then punctuating the point by swiping the blanket Archer offered to share with her.
This is called back to at the very end, when Archer orders her to turn over the scanner readings to Shran. Blalock’s face hardens with restrained fury, as she is in an even worse position than Archer. These are her people she’s being asked to betray—but her people also betrayed the treaty. And then, mindful of her very words to Archer earlier, she borrows Reed’s communicator to once again do her duty as his first mate and order Enterprise to leave the Andorians be.
It’s unfortunate that we have to wait eight episodes for there to be consequences for this, as this is the sort of thing that should (and will) upend local politics sooner rather than later. Still, it’s a strong building block for the aspect of Enterprise that would prove the most interesting.
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido is very much looking forward to 2022 sucking less than 2021.
I can’t explicitly remember any at the moment, but I have to assume Shran had scenes with Travis or Hoshi at some point. It was an opportunity to at least partially fix “pink-skin” that sadly went unused.
Anyway, I consider this Enterprise’s first decent episode. P’Jem also seems like it would be a fascinating place under better circumstances.
Couldn’t agree more with the review. For me it’s the first essential episode following the pilot.
Combs is fantastic as Shran and during the show’s first run it was always a great to see him and the Andorrans first show up.
The twist at the end of the episode that the Andorians were actually right was something I didn’t expect when first seeing the episode and makes it rate very highly in my book. I do wish the show spent more time showing ‘local’ galactic politics and world building towards the Federation’s founding
“All this time they’ve been calling these monks liars and all this time they’ve been right.”
The ending turns this episode, and possibly the whole series, on its head. Earlier episodes, notably the pilot, have demonstrated that Vulcans can be jerks. Nevertheless, we’re primed to trust them. And then we get that ending. The Vulcans have been calm and unyielding throughout, but it turns out they’re the ones that are lying. The Andorians have come across as paranoid brutes, but it turns out they’re right to be suspicious.
Archer seems to be back to deliberately winding T’Pol up, as well as sniping at her for things that aren’t her fault, but this time she has no rejoinder. Again though, this is the episode that makes it clear that her first loyalty is to her crew, not to her people. Early in the episode, Phlox suggests she’s ashamed of her colleagues on Enterprise and doesn’t want to be associated with them. By the end, it’s her own people who have given her a reason to be ashamed.
And of course we have the debut of Shran, possibly the show’s most notable recurring character. The episode is probably intended to set him up as a recurring foil to Archer (after all, he’s played by Jeffrey Combs!). It’s only partially successful since there doesn’t seem to be that much depth to him at first, even with the twist, but later appearances will show other sides to his character.
While both Shran and Tholos will be back later in the season in “Shadows of P’Jem”, Kelas doesn’t appear in that one (although apparently he was in an early draft). Reed gets left in command of the ship for the first time and even gets to sit in the big chair…as well as being the second main character to use the transporter after Archer in “Broken Bow”. In fact, it’s a pretty good episode for him: The rest of the crew roll their eyes at him complaining about the lack of proper security procedures, but his ideas will eventually become standard.
Could Archer and Reed not have come up with a plan that didn’t involve blowing up an ancient statue? (It’s not even as though the plan works particularly well, as they let two of their three targets escape into the catacombs.) Interesting that Archer knows about Surak: He’s obviously picking up bits of Vulcan culture. Ironic that it’s the young Vulcan who first uncovers the hatch to the surveillance centre. Sadly the final matt shot isn’t entirely successful as the Vulcan security people don’t really react to being simultaneously exposed to both Starfleet and the Andorians!
T’Pol states she’s been on Enterprise for nine weeks and four days. The opening scene of Tucker wondering whether going places the Vulcans told them about actually counts as “exploring” feels like an exchange written to stop people writing in, although this seems too early for them to have received viewer feedback.
And did the Vulcans really offer them the Stone of G’Kar?!
One of the interesting things about colour is how the cultural conventions we grow up with influence our perception, creating discrete colours out of a multidimensional spectrum. Whether you see what we call light and dark blue as the same colour rather than different. Whether you see blue and green as different. Whether you see pink as a different colour to red.
My head canon is that all humans look like hues of the same red-based colour to Andorians, just like we’d describe all Andorians as blue be they navy blue or sky blue.
Overall though this is a fine episode, and well played.
Well, I don’t see what is wrong with “pink-skin.” For someone who is rather blue and searching for an instant denigrating nickname, it was halfway obvious. That first contact involved a sample of exactly two humans with quite similar skin and hair colors. Unless he consulted a bootleg copy of the Vulcan database under “H” like “human” …
More interesting that Archer takes it on himself to quite possibly break the key alliance of Earth, with no promise that it would be replaced by another. Now we know where Kirk learned diplomacy, maybe.
And the Vulcans are so stoic that they ignore five intruders in their high-tech listening post for the better part of a minute. I was sure some of the people in the background were looking at the party.
I don’t think its great how the crew of the Enterprise constantly treat T’Pol as though she’s the vulcan high command itself. She obviously didn’t know what was going on at P’Jem and yet everyone is shooting looks at her as though this is her spy array she personally set up. I also don’t think Archer was having his trust in Vulcans betrayed exactly. More like he found a reason to justify the racism he’s displayed towards Vulcans all this time. It’s nice that he wanted to visit the monastery, but it seemed like he was looking forward to yet another opportunity to embarrass T’Pol more than anything, and has only too much fun having a justified reason to shoot up the place and do the opposite of show respect. At this point I feel like they just unfortunately miscast Bakula in the role. It’s obvious during the voluntary extra interrogation scene that they want Archer to have the bravado to be a swashbuckling arrogant intrepid hero like Kirk and I just don’t feel like its matching with the performance well. Seems written for a different actor entirely.
o.m.: As I said, I can see it here in this episode, for the reasons you state, and I even admitted to in the rewatch article, but he keeps using it, all the way through to the final episode of the series. That’s my issue. And it’s not so much that the character kept using it as the writers kept using it without thinking about what it meant.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This is where the money is. If they’d stayed here the series would’ve been golden. As far as I’m concerned this is the perfect Andorian makeup, you need go no further. Anytime Shran shows up, you the episode is gonna be solid…until that episode that doesn’t exist.
@krad in 7, don’t you think that nicknames like that stick regardless of the facts? How many Russians are really named Ivan, and are Native Americans really red?
o.m.: And those are just as offensive.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@9/o.m.: The problem is less the realism issue and more that, at least from an out-of-universe perspective, using “pink-skin” as a synonym for humans dehumanizes those humans who aren’t pink, many of whom already have a history of being dehumanized.
I’ve always taken the “pink skin” thing as part of the racist assumptions theme going on through this episode, just like Vulcans thinking all humans smell or humans thinking Vulcans don’t lie. It’s the start of the series – humans are assholes, Vulcans are assholes, and apparently Andorians are assholes too. Like you say, it gives them somewhere to go. Like you also say, it’s troubling that Shran goes on using it as a term of endearment, like a more racist version of Neelix keeping on calling Tuvok “Mr Vulcan” even though it started off as a misunderstanding. I did always want Shran to start calling a human a “pink skin”, then realise he’s talking to Mayweather and stomp off muttering “Stupid humans…”
I also like how this one incident in only episode seven continues to have repercussions throughout the length of the show and for centuries to come. It’s because of this that T’Pol falls out of favour with Vulcan High Command, and they take it out on her mother, and she joins the Syrannites, which leads to a revolution in Vulcan politics, which kicks off the Romulan war. It’s because of this that Shran sees Archer as being on his side and starts to build the alliance that will eventually become the Federation.
Yep, this is the best episode so far, and the beginning of so much to come. A nice job fleshing out both Vulcans and Andorians. For all ENT’s faults, the work it did expanding and deepening what we know about those two species is perhaps the most valuable thing it added to the Trek universe.
However, even when this episode first aired, I had grown sick of TV shows using torture scenes as a plot device. Especially torture meant to extract information, because fiction too often perpetuates the dangerous myth that that actually works, when the consensus of interrogation experts is that it’s actually counterproductive if your goal is to get reliable information, since the victims will tell any lie to get out of torture, and the stress could impair their memory and cause them to get details wrong. So the only reason for anyone to employ torture is just because they’re sadistic bastards who enjoy bullying helpless people. So introducing Shran as a torturer makes it harder to accept him as a sympathetic character later on. (I made a point in my Enterprise novels of having Shran feel remorse at having employed torture here, as well as having him drop the “pink-skin” slur once he’d met enough humans to realize the majority of us aren’t pink.)
“Indeed, the most appealing aspect of doing a prequel like this is to sow the seeds of what we know will come later, but it’s a philosophy the show only embraced every once in a while, at least prior to the final season.”
I think the final season did that too much, practically in every storyline, while seasons 2 & 3 did it too little. I think it’s contrived if every experience the characters have is setup for some future thing we know about, so it’s more effective as an occasional thing. Season 1 struck a pretty good balance with things like the Axanar, the Andorians here, the Malurians and Coridan later on, etc.
@3/cap-mjb: “And did the Vulcans really offer them the Stone of G’Kar?!”
The Stone of J’Kah.
@4/jmwhite: “My head canon is that all humans look like hues of the same red-based colour to Andorians, just like we’d describe all Andorians as blue be they navy blue or sky blue.”
I’m not sure that works, since carotene and melanin are two distinct pigments.
Besides, as Keith says, the problem is that it’s not really something the Andorians coined, it’s something that a bunch of white TV writers coined as an alien term for humans because they, the TV writers, assumed that pink was the default color of humanity. It doesn’t matter if you can rationalize it within the fiction, because the problem is the message it sends to the real-life audience.
@13/CLB: Seems to be pronounced the same though!
It occurs to me that a better Andorian nickname for humans would have been “red-blood”—since Andorians are pale blue because of blue blood, they would naturally assume pink humans have red blood. This would both distinguish them from the green-blooded Vulcans, while simultaneously including humans of all races.
15: I concur! That would also have tied into McCoy and his constant green-blooded comments to Spock, which have certainly not aged well. It would have put the oxygen on the other molecule, so to speak
@13/CLB: On the latter point both you and krad are 100% correct.
@14/cap: “Seems to be pronounced the same though!”
Only in an English or other non-rhotic accent.
I had thought in the later seasons of the show that “pink-skin” was Shran’s nickname for Archer personally. I don’t remember him using it as a blanket term for Humans in later episodes, but I could be wrong.
Also, I thought it was canon that the Andorians were Founding Members of the UFP, not just members of long standing.
It also threw me when they called the planet Andoria, because I thought it was called Andor in DS9, but once again, my memory may be faulty.
Re Shran: Not only does he start out as a torturer, he’s still a torturer in his later appearances. A more sophisticated torturer than just hitting someone repeatedly, but a torturer nonetheless. But that’s a discussion for when we get to Season 4.
@19: Enterprise establishes that the Andorians were founder members of the Federation. I’m not sure if it had been made clear before that. It was also the place that first mentioned the Andorians’ homeworld: Andor came from the DS9 tie-in novels (and continued to be used in the novels even after Andoria was canonically established: there was a deliberate loophole about that one).
DS9 did use Andor in, I believe, “In the Pale Moonlight,” but it was Andoria on Enterprise. I always chalked it up to our planet being both Earth and Terra. *shrug*
It was always assumed that Andorians were one of the founders of the Federation, an assumption that many works of tie-in fiction (novels, comics, and games) ran with, but it wasn’t formally established onscreen until Enterprise.
And agreed 100% with you about the use of torture here, Christopher. It’s utterly useless as an interrogation tool, but the despicable use of it as a fictional device increased a thousandfold in the first decade of this millennium…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
To be fair, you could argue that at least when Shran uses torture in the fourth season it’s accurately depicted as being counterproductive.
krad: I’d completely forgotten that but you’re quite right. It does get called Andor in “In the Pale Moonlight”, as well as “In the Cards” and “The Sound of Her Voice”. There’s a theory that Andor and Andoria are separate planets a la Romulus and Remus (Enterprise portrays Andoria as a moon orbiting a gas giant), although it’s equally possible they’re different names for the same planet.
@23: I’m not sure how that’s any different from here. In both cases, Shran tortures someone who’s telling the truth as far as they know because he’s convinced they’re lying. (I guess in season four he does at least admit the possibility of the victim just telling him what he wants to hear to make him stop. That said, he seems to also view the fact that they kept to the same story despite being tortured as proof that it’s the truth.)
@24: That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? Using torture doesn’t actually get him any useful information in either case. For that matter, offhand, the only time I can recall torture actually working in Enterprise is when Archer himself uses it in the third season.
Also, I’d like to point out that the moving antenna prosthetics are really quite impressive. I wonder how much they cost to make? I suppose these days it would be done with CGI.
This was a good episode, and I loved the twist that the Vulcans were not always honest, and prone to manipulating others. The show, writers and actors were beginning to settle into the milieu and the characters. And Commander Shran, with all his warts, is one of my favorite recurring Star Trek characters of all time; a great antagonist who enlivened the show whenever he appeared.
@19/JasonD: “Also, I thought it was canon that the Andorians were Founding Members of the UFP, not just members of long standing.”
No, it was fan lore, never canonized until Enterprise.
Here’s how it went. In 1975, Franz Joseph Schnaubelt’s Star Fleet Technical Manual posited that the five founding nations of the Federation were the United Nations of Earth, the Alpha Centauri Concordium of Planets, the Planetary Confederation of 40 Eridani (which James Blish had previously proposed as Vulcan’s primary star), the Star Empire of Epsilon Indii (sic, typo for “Indi”), and the United Planets of 61 Cygni, all named for real stars near Sol. It’s clear from the names that Schnaubelt envisioned them as multi-planet alliances that combined into a larger one, and the flags and symbols he created suggest that he intended all of them except 40 Eridani to be human colonies (e.g. “Epsilon Indii” has a stylized “EI” symbol and 61 Cygni’s emblem includes a stylized swan).
Then, in 1977, the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual by Eileen Palestine and Geoffrey Mandel established Epsilon Indi VIII (correcting the spelling) as the Andorian homeworld under the name Andor, and 61 Cygni V as the Tellarite homeworld under the name Tellar, while also affirming 40 Eri as Vulcan. So from then on, the usual assumption in fandom was that Earth, Vulcan, Tellar, Andor, and Alpha Centauri were the founding worlds, although some works postulated different founders, e.g. both the 1979 Spaceflight Chronology and the 1999-2000 Starfleet: Year One serial make Rigel a founding member as well.
Mandel’s Star Trek Star Charts, published during ENT’s run, kept 40 Eri for Vulcan (eventually all but canonized in season 4, though season 1 implied a more distant Vulcan) and 61 Cygni for Tellar, but moved Andoria to Procyon, since that’s closer to Vulcan than Epsilon Indi (which is in the other direction from Earth). It instead identifies Epsilon Indi with Draylax, a system established in ENT as having a pre-existing trade relationship with Earth’s Space Boomers.
And yes, ENT did change it from Andor to Andoria, I guess because the writers didn’t remember the previous usage in DS9 (which came from fan lore). Or maybe they just didn’t want viewer to think they were saying “and/or” all the time.
@26/Vulpes: “Also, I’d like to point out that the moving antenna prosthetics are really quite impressive. I wonder how much they cost to make? I suppose these days it would be done with CGI.”
Nope, the Andorian antennae on Discovery are still done practically. https://www.startrek.com/videos/sfx-makeup-andorian-video
@28/CLB: Huh, interesting! Do you know if they’re controlled by the actors, either in Enterprise or Discovery? That would be a reason not to go to CGI.
This is the first episode of Enterprise that I actually remembered before rewatching it.
@13 CLB:
THANK YOU for the comments on torture (and to KRAD for agreeing). The effectiveness of torture is just taken for granted in far too many films, shows, and even books (side-eye to WoT), and the reinforcement of that unspoken assumption has been tremendously damaging in the real world.
S
As I understand it today, it’s generally accepted that Andor is the gas giant that the Andorian Homeworld Andoria orbits.
@29/Vulpes: The actors need to concentrate on their performances. Animatronics are operated by offscreen puppeteers using radio control rigs, coordinating with the actors’ performances.
And CGI isn’t the only advanced special effects technology. Prosthetics and animatronics have advanced over the past few decades too. If anything, there’s been a trend in recent years away from overdependence on CGI and toward making more use of animatronics, miniatures, etc. again.
@32/Mr. D: “As I understand it today, it’s generally accepted that Andor is the gas giant that the Andorian Homeworld Andoria orbits.”
That’s one fan theory, but I wouldn’t say it’s “generally accepted.” The novel Worlds of Deep Space Nine: Andor: Paradigm by Heather Jarman established that Andor was the name outsiders used for the world (at least in the 24th century) and Andoria was the indigenous name (though I would’ve expected the opposite, humans adding the “-ia” suffix to Anglicize it), like “Italy” vs. “Italia.” In my Trek novels, I call the gas giant Fesoan, after the native name for Andor that Lora Johnson proposed in The Worlds of the Federation.
Not that anyone necessarily would have discussed their wedding tackle or marriage customs under the circumstances of these eppisodes, but did Enterprise wind up picking up any of the novel-established idea that Andorians have four sexes?
(I think based on a throw-off line in TNG that established that the traditional Andorian marriage involves four people).
@34/benjamin: “did Enterprise wind up picking up any of the novel-established idea that Andorians have four sexes?”
No, they treated Andorian gender as binary. Although the novels established that two of the Andorian sexes are called “he/him” in English and the other two are called “she/her” in English, so ENT’s treatment doesn’t disprove the novels’ take, at least.
@34: The Andorian arc in the fourth season seems to imply that Andorians have two sexes and a marriage involves two people. You could always interpret the “Andorian marriages involve four people” line as meaning that an Andorian wedding requires four people—possibly an officiant and a witness, plus the two participants.
It also establishes a subspecies of the Andorians called the Aenar, so I guess you could say the four sexes are Andorian male, Andorian female, Aenar male, Aenar female? That doesn’t make much sense, though. The Aenar do behave rather differently—they’re pacifists, unlike the garden variety Andorians, so I guess you could argue that their gender roles are different enough to be distinct.
@34-36: Yes, Enterprise not only portrays Andorians as bi-gendered but also as monogamous. The line from TNG that the novels took their cue from was half a sentence where Data says “Andorian marriages require groups of four people unless…” I kind of assumed they traditionally had double-weddings.
Yes, he only had the two points of reference in Archer and Tucker, but still. I mean, Crayola changed their “flesh-colored” crayon to peach in 1962, you’d think the producers of Enterprise could find an epithet that didn’t signal that the only humans who matter are the white folks forty years later.
Wouldn’t the real issue there not be in the epithet but in the show falling back on square-jawed white guys as the heroes again? That’s the origin of the problem. If anything, I thought it was refreshing to hear an angry alien throwing it back at them, as if he beamed in from a fan message board.
Didn’t make me like Enterprise. Did make me like Shran, though. Star Trek suddenly had its own Archie Bunker/George Jefferson, so I kept watching. For a little while.
@37/cap: “Yes, Enterprise not only portrays Andorians as bi-gendered but also as monogamous.”
It portrays certain Andorians as monogamous. Humans have a variety of subcultures and marital customs. Why can’t aliens?
@38/Dingo: “Wouldn’t the real issue there not be in the epithet but in the show falling back on square-jawed white guys as the heroes again? That’s the origin of the problem.”
Seems to me they’re both symptoms of the same root issue.
That issue being that Shran should have been a regular member of the crew — nay — the star of the show? Yes, I agree. ;-)
Thought number one: Andor/Andoria isn’t the only canon-clash we’ve had. In TNG Heart of Glory clearly refers to the Klingon home world as “Kling” two years prior to it being canonically named “Quo’nos” in The Undiscovered Country. Perhaps we can rationalize both to being universal translator quirks?
Thought number two: Perhaps the continuing use of “pink-skin” was deliberate? Perhaps the writers were trying to show how stupid defining people by skin pigmentation is by having someone use a term that was clearly not accurate?
@41 Hmph. Most white writers aren’t that adept at navigating skin color in the current day. I think writers 20 years would be even less so.
(41)
Yes, it doesn’t take a genius writer, now or in any other era, to figure out how a bigot thinks. They simply lock on to the most obvious physical characteristic and mock it, loudly, repeatedly.
@@@@@ 41 – The line is “I would rather die here, than let the traitors of Kling pick the meat from my bones.”
It could be interpreted as honour. And Klingon could mean people of honour. When Worf says “They have no honour, it could be he’s actually saying “They have no Kling”.
What was intended? Nope. A possible work around? Sure, why not?
I remember thinking that this was the first really good episode of Enterprise, but that I was a bit disappointed that the Andorians weren’t depicted as being a warrior matriarchy, like they were implied to be in Marvel’s Star Trek: Starfleet Academy comics from the 1990s.
That said, my love of Jeffrey Combs was enough to make up for it.
@krad in 10, I’m generally OK with offensive language in direct speech as long as it is in character for an offensive character — or one who is a child of his or her times. I see it as problematic when supposedly non-offensive characters should have known better.
Of course science fiction has purposes beyond mere entertainment. It is often a commentary on contemporary issues, and in this regard casting choices and language matter. A bit like what @dingo wrote in 38. As a white male getting on being old, I can’t really feel what it is being in an oppressed minority. A whiff of it, maybe, because I’m not American, and lots of trying-to-be-inclusive SF creators include hyphen-Americans rather than non-Americans in their cast of characters.
@@@@@ Iacomina in 45, we will see Lieutenant Talas in a couple of episodes …
@39/CLB: Well, yes, I suppose you could argue that the ones we saw on Enterprise were the exception to the rule, or the rule that there were exceptions to, but Enterprise didn’t portray any Andorian as not monogamous. Polygamy and open marriages were the Denobulans’ thing so I guess they didn’t want to confuse it.
@41/DonRudophII: “Perhaps we can rationalize both to being universal translator quirks?”
How many names does our planet have? Earth, Terra, Terre, Tierra, Erde, Jorden, Zemlja, Prathivi, Chikyuu, Deiqao, Dunia, and so on. It’s not an error when an alien species has more than one language or culture. It’s an error when they don’t.
“Perhaps the continuing use of “pink-skin” was deliberate? Perhaps the writers were trying to show how stupid defining people by skin pigmentation is by having someone use a term that was clearly not accurate?”
If they’d meant it to be problematical, they would’ve said so — e.g. give Travis or Hoshi a biting comeback when Shran calls them that (like Uhura’s “Sorry, neither” when Sulu calls her “fair maiden” in “The Naked Time”). The problem, as Keith has already said, is that the writers used the term consistently for four years without ever giving any hint that there was anything wrong with generalizing humans as a pink-skinned species.
@48/cap-mjb: “but Enterprise didn’t portray any Andorian as not monogamous.”
Of course not, but that’s not how the tie-in game works. Tie-ins establish tons of things that aren’t mentioned in the shows — that’s the nature of the beast. We fill in the gaps with conjecture, and the readers can buy into the conjectures as long as there’s nothing in canon to contradict them. Sometimes canon makes assumptions that, of course, disregard what’s in the tie-ins, but as long as they don’t explicitly make the conjectures impossible, readers are still free to pretend the conjectures are valid, or imagine ways to reconcile what surface inconsistencies arise. This is all just pretend, after all.
Heck, sometimes canon does the same thing. Look at how Picard reconciled the ridge-browed Michael Westmore Romulan design with the original smooth-browed Romulan design by explaining them as “northern” and “southern” Romulans, respectively. No previous production showed both kinds of Romulan together; each respective design was treated as the way all Romulans looked. But all it took was one work imagining a way to reconcile the two. It’s not that hard to do.
We’re back in the 22nd! Computer, please fire up the Classics!
– Blue (Da Ba Dee) starts playing –
@49: The tie-ins went a bit further than portraying the Andorian four-person marriage as a cultural difference or individual choice though, it was a major plot point that all four genders were needed for reproduction, which canon ignored and pretty much outright contradicted (although the tie-ins ignored the contradiction and continued to write Enterprise-era Andorians “their” way).
@51/cap-mjb: “The tie-ins went a bit further than portraying the Andorian four-person marriage as a cultural difference or individual choice though, it was a major plot point that all four genders were needed for reproduction”
Humans need two genders for reproduction, but there are plenty of same-sex couples out there. There’s more to relationships than just having babies.
The novels did show instances of Andorians having romantic interest in a single partner (e.g. Shar and Prynn, IIRC) and only arranging four-person groupings if they were required for the act of procreation. Or, I think, of three people who are in love and want to get together but have to find a willing fourth partner if they want a baby.
“which canon ignored and pretty much outright contradicted”
Only if you take them at face value and don’t use your imagination. Yes, we saw in TATV (which was a holodeck simulation anyway and is thus a suspect source) that Shran and Zhamel had a child, but we didn’t see the actual act of conception, so there’s plenty of room for the possibility that they involved two other people in the process and then didn’t stay attached to them afterward — much like how gay couples sometimes use surrogate parents to have kids. And Shran saying that Zhamel “gave birth” is no contradiction either, because while four people are needed for conception, obviously only one of them will actually carry the child to term.
“(although the tie-ins ignored the contradiction and continued to write Enterprise-era Andorians “their” way)”
See, this is the root of your misunderstanding. You’re assuming that the tie-ins were free to ignore canon and go their own way. A lot of laypeople seem to believe that, but that’s absolutely not how it works. Everything we do has to be approved by the studio in advance. The initial proposal has to be approved before we get permission to write the manuscript, and the manuscript has to be approved before it gets published. This is done to ensure that the books stay consistent with canon as it exists at the time. Any blatant inconsistency would get rejected, and the manuscript would have to be rewritten to bring it in line with canon before the book would be approved. Those are the ground rules that all tie-ins work under.
So the fact that the books were able to continue using the 4-gender Andorian paradigm is proof, in and of itself, that that paradigm was not irresolvably contradicted by canon. In the judgment of the studio’s continuity checkers, the different assumptions made by the shows and the books could be reconciled, and that is why the books were allowed to do it.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I found Shran to be rather less enjoyable to watch compared with Brunt or Weyoun. I just see his only character trait as being very angry all the time, no matter what happened around him (albeit I have not seen the rest of the series yet). Other than that, I really enjoyed this episode, especially the ending. It’s a refreshing break from Gene Roddenberry’s vision of “everyone plays nice all the time” future.
A far cry from the use of torture by Cardassians, where the goal is to either break the subject or to elicit a confession for a show trial.
This was definitely the episode that began to show Enterprise’s potential.
Enterprise is/was a great serie, far more better and more Star Trek than Discovery or Picard. All the new Star Trek are awfull, besides Lower Decks.
The Andorians and Shran(played by Combs) are great, really liked them in the show.
@52/CLB:
That gives me an idea for an alien species where the offspring are gestated in parts by multiple individuals, or incubated in multiple eggs, and those parts are assembled to form the complete child. I wouldn’t be surprised if some science fiction writer out there has already done it.
@56/Vulpes: Maybe that’s how Pandronians reproduce?
There is at least one sentient “species” in one of Poul Anderson’s novels (I don’t recall the title at the moment) where a person requires three individuals, each a different species. Together, the three individuals form a specific person. Different combinations create different people, so an individual component can be part of different people.
@56- I seem to recall in the “Aliens Ate My Homework,” series, one of the eponymous aliens explaining that its* species required several sexes to conceive a child, and several more to bear it to term.
Huh. That’s two for two Enterprise Rewatches that have prompted Bruce Coville references. Maybe I ought to revisit his oeuvre.
*Pronoun used advisedly. The conversation was in the context of the alien politely declining the protagonist’s attempt to call them “he,” or “she.” The singular they did not, as I recall, come up.
I’m not going to lie, Andorians are a major reason for the lingering interest in ENTERPRISE that pulled me deep into STAR TREK after a longish while of being more familiar with STAR WARS.
As you might imagine, I rather enjoyed this episode – especially T’Pol’s little “You know me” moment when Archer & Trip joke with her about Vulcan reactions to human body odour, T’Pol being Very Patient with Doctor Phlox casually pinching her food (It’s definitely a Big Family v. Only Child sort of moment) and Mr Reed being rock-solid competent in the face of a hostage situation.
I am more than a little disappointed that the Captain and Trip just casually assume that there’s only one intruder and trigger an ambush, rather than withdraw in order to come back with more friends & more options, but then Jonathan Archer has always been cussedly optimistic.
I do wonder if the Andorian failure to leave a guard with the prisoners at all times may be a cultural thing – they seem to be hot tempered and suspicious enough that leaving a single guard in a room full of Vulcans for a prolonged period might lead to the sort of bloodshed they’re trying to avoid.
It’s equally possible that, having made repeated visits to P’Jem, they’ve become a little complacent (Since the monks have never yet made trouble and Vulcans are nothing if not consistent) and are more interested in running searches than they are standing sentry.
There’s also the technological factor to consider – given the Andorians can scan the room any time they like, they may feel putting a guard in there is redundant (Though that does beg the question of why they don’t have someone watching a scanner focussed on that room at all times – which makes me wonder if a cultural preference for instinctive, rather than systematic action may be at work).
I also wonder if Vulcans find human body odour so hard to handle because, as ocean worlders, we’re simply so much more moist than they’re used to.
P.S. So far as the Andor/Andoria discussion goes, I rather like the idea that – in at least one language/dialect – the name of the Andorian homeworld and the gas giant it orbits suggest a direct connection to each other in the same way that ‘Henrietta’ is derived from ‘Henry’.
I wonder if Andorians, speaking poetically, regard Andoria as their mother and Fesoan as their grandmother
ED: Ultimately, we can come up with all the rationalizations we want, but the truth is, TV writers almost never have surveillance of any sort on prisoners, because if they do, the plot won’t work. It’s so commonplace, I almost didn’t even bother mentioning it — it’s more worth mentioning when it they do have surveillance (like in Discovery‘s “There is a Tide…”).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@49 Re the ridge-browed Romulans. Even before Picard, I thought the difference was simply due to various ethnic differences. They all start out as Vulcans, after all, and the absence or presence of brow ridges was likely part of the ethnic variation among Vulcans. Recall, we also see a range of skin shades among both Vulcans and Romulans. It may simply be that the Vulcan clans that “gathered under the raptor’s wings” had a larger proportion of those with prominent brow ridges, and that after the separation/exile, those characteristics became dominant among those who were to become Romulans and bred true. There’s probably still the occasional brow-ridged Vulcan (although we’re never shown one) as there are certainly plenty of smooth browed Romulans. As a range of ethnic variation, it’s not appreciably greater than that which occurs in our own human race.
@52: I think the novels largely portrayed one-on-one relationships as a cultural taboo, although obviously cultural taboos can change a lot in 200 years.
Obviously you’d know more about this than I do, but just how stringent would the continuity checks be? I know around the time TNG started Gene Rodenberry’s office had a reputation for vetoing anything not previously established on screen, but by the late 00s, when there was no Star Trek series, William Shatner was co-writing novels where Kirk came back from the dead, and the Enterprise novels were overwriting the series finale in a way that made what got Diane Carey blacklisted seem subtle, would whoever at the studio was in charge of approving these things either notice or care about an apparent discrepancy in how many parents Andorians have?
cap-mjb: The people who’ve been in charge of approvals since Roddenberry’s death — first Paula Block, then John Van Citters — are Trek fans who care very much about the integrity of the franchise. Trust me, they pay attention both to all the details and to what makes a good story.
I’ve worked in more than 30 different licensed universes, and Paula and JVC are two of the best in the business at threading the needle between fidelity to source material and making the tie-ins as strong as possible.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’ve seen it suggested that Romulans got rid of Vulcan psychic powers – and the necessity for strict emotional control that they require – at some point after their exodus; I’ve tended to assume that the forehead ridges seen in some Romulan populations derived from that same programme (Presumably as a side effect developed in certain populations).
I do, however, agree that differences in makeup designs over time are most interesting when depicted as examples of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, rather than simple errors (I remain hopeful that some elderly Klingon will stand up when asked how rational sapients could wear the costumes seen in Season 1 of DISCOVERY and reply “Because we looked Good!”).
@62. krad: True, perfectly true, which is why it’s always more fun to think up explanations than to bemoan the conventions of the genre!
@63/markvolund: “It may simply be that the Vulcan clans that “gathered under the raptor’s wings” had a larger proportion of those with prominent brow ridges, and that after the separation/exile, those characteristics became dominant among those who were to become Romulans and bred true.”
That’s my assumption too, as 2000 years is too little time for such marked phenotypic variation to evolve.
It helps that nearly all the Romulans we saw in TOS wore helmets that covered their foreheads, except for maybe a half-dozen people who were all authority figures. I used to assume that even then, the smooth-headed Romulans were a minority but were culturally dominant, like South African whites under apartheid. But the 2009 movie implied that Nero’s smooth-headed Romulans were working-class in the 24th century, so things might have inverted by then. Although Picard portrays them as both existing in comparable numbers.
@64/cap: “I think the novels largely portrayed one-on-one relationships as a cultural taboo, although obviously cultural taboos can change a lot in 200 years.”
And being gay was a cultural taboo in our society for many centuries, and still is in much of the world today. Just because something is a minority practice doesn’t mean it wouldn’t exist. Alien species should have as much diversity in individual beliefs and practices as humans do, even if sci-fi tends to stereotype them in horribly lazy ways.
And indeed, ENT would do a good job portraying such diversity in Vulcans as it went on, with the V’tosh ka’tur and the cultural taboo on melders. And “Judgment” added diversity to Klingons by establishing that they don’t all belong to the warrior caste, it’s just that that caste has monopolized the levers of power for generations. So it stands to reason Andorians would have similar diversity.
“William Shatner was co-writing novels where Kirk came back from the dead, and the Enterprise novels were overwriting the series finale in a way that made what got Diane Carey blacklisted seem subtle”
Neither of which contradicts the letter on what’s onscreen. Obviously Kirk coming back from the dead requires him to have died in the first place, so that’s not a contradiction, merely a reversal, like how The Search for Spock reversed Spock’s death in The Wrath of Khan. It depicts Kirk’s death in Generations exactly as it happened, but merely posits that there was an untold story after that in which Kirk was brought back. We never heard anyone in a later movie explicitly say “Kirk is still dead,” so there is no contradiction of the letter of the canon.
And what we saw in the ENT finale was explicitly presented as a holodeck simulation, a secondhand account rather than the actual events, which provides an obvious loophole for getting around it. The books are entirely consistent with canon in acknowledging that said simulation exists in the 24th century exactly as shown onscreen; it merely elaborates that the simulation was a coverup of the real truth. Heck, even in TATV, the simulation avoids actually showing Trip’s death; it cuts from him being wheeled into the medical scanner to Archer and T’Pol talking after his putative death. That’s a dead giveaway, pardon the pun, that Berman & Braga themselves were leaving a loophole for the simulation to be deceptive or incomplete, just in case they got a chance to revive the show and bring Trip back.
As Keith said, Paula and John are excellent at what they do and have an encyclopedic knowledge of Trek continuity. That’s why they know just how far the books can bend things without violating the strict letter of onscreen canon.
krad and CLB: Okay, thanks, I fully respect your assessment of the people involved!
First actually good episode of Enterprise seems about right. I liked Combs’ and Blalock’s performances. Regarding the latter character, I’ve been watching the series out of order of late, having gone through the third season and now onto the fourth, and checking out the occasional first season episode concurrent with this rewatch. And so it’s fascinating to see this dramatic difference in T’Pol’s portrayal from earlier to later seasons. Later seasons T’Pol is much more relaxed and dare I say it, more “human.” While it makes sense from a character standpoint to show this evolution and “growth,” I find the earlier, snottier and more serious personality to have more bite and is more amusing too. I do prefer her more relaxed look as of season three though.
I’ve also always detested Shran’s use of “pink skin(s).” Obviously, humans are of varying skin tones so this to me is like saying only the “white” humans are the only ones who count because they’re the only ones he takes note of. So it seemed like subtle racism by the writers whether intentional or not.
Dash it all, reading over @66 reminds me why typing on a keyboard beats tapping at a mobile phone screen – I failed to specify that the programme to remove Vulcan psychic powers from the Romulan population was one of genetic engineering, which is a fairly important detail to miss out on.
I definitely like the idea that brow-ridges are a preexisting feature in Vulcan populations that became far more widespread amongst Romulans after the Great Separation – one would assume because the Forebears of Romulus represented a relatively small gene pool, so traits once seen in a minority would become much more widespread over time (Even were they recessive, rather than dominant).
There’s this moment late in DS9‘s first season – a season mostly defined by TNG-esque standalone stories – where we get two episodes that set a new trend: Duet and In the Hands of the Prophets. Both episodes plant major seeds for long term storytelling, and open up major venues for Cardassian and Bajoran stories.
The Andorian Incident is Enterprise‘s equivalent of this. It sets up the show’s first major story arc, and it gives us one of the show’s most memorable secondary characters. Shran is beautifully played by Combs. You instantly sympathize with his anger, even though he’s committing some truly repulsive acts of agression. The minute we get that shocker of an ending, we realize just how much pressure and responsibility he must be under. You realize he’s just doing what he’s doing for the safety of his people. It gives us an insight into Andorian society that we never got back in TOS.
It also sets up T’Pol’s contentuous long-term friction with Vulcan High Command. The way Jolene plays T’Pol’s attempt at balancing all opposing interests makes for some truly tense scenes (with the great Roxann Dawson at the helm, no less). This is a glimpse of what Enterprise does best.
And talk about that ending! I felt as outraged as Archer. It masterfully plays with audience expectations that Vulcans would never do such a thing. You just assume after 35 years of Trek that all Vulcans are boyscouts just because of the time spent with Spock. Some fans might forget that being a centered logical person doesn’t preclude you from still doing abominable actions in the name of “national security”. And that is one of the reasons the show gets unfairly trashed, with some fans assuming the prequel show is rewriting history, when the reality is Vulcans have always been this way, in some shape and form (remember Sakonna on DS9‘s The Maquis?).
I later browsed Fred Dekker’s filmography on IMDb. I had no idea he’d been behind Robocop 3, proving it is possible for anyone to do a career rebound after such a disaster.
“Some fans might forget that being a centered logical person doesn’t preclude you from still doing abominable actions in the name of “national security”.”
Very true. We see very few sympathetic Vulcans in the run of the various shows. Even Sarek, one of the most beloved characters, is revealed to have been part of the plan to wipe out all life on Q’onos in Discovery (Of course, there wee zero consequences to his actions so you have to wonder just how unpopular such a course of action would have been to the Federation). Archer comes across as a jerk but the Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites all give him a run for the money.
@72/kkozoriz: Pretty much so. Sarek’s actions are a good reminder of how nostalgia can blind viewers. It’s easier for most to just recall Mark Lenard’s performance on ST3 as Sarek pleads for Kirk to rescue Spock’s katra and just assume he’s always had this serene, friendly presence, while overlooking some of the things he’s actually done.
In Sarek’s very first appearance he made racist comments toward Gav and was revealed to be hiding a near-fatal medical condition from his wife.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Was it really racist if pretty much every Tellarite we’ve seen argues for no reason? About the only one I can recall that didn’t was an inmate in an asylum.
And how do we know that keeping medical information from your wife isn’t a Vulcan thing? T’Pau asked T’Pring if she was ready to become the property of the winner if the duel between Kirk & Spock. I don’t imagine property has much right to any sort of personal information.
Quoth kkozoriz: “Was it really racist if pretty much every Tellarite we’ve seen argues for no reason?”
How can you even ask that question? We’ve seen only a small handful of Tellarites, a statistically insignificant percentage of the entire population of a species.
Any generalization about a group of people’s behavior because they share an irrelevant biological characteristic is racist.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
FYI. Hulu no longer streams Enterprise. This is where I was watching from. I will need to watch from Paramount+ now.
@@@@@ 76 – Sure, we’ve only seen a handful but I’m sure Sarek has decades of dealing with them. It’s not as if he was making that declaration if Gav was the only Tellarite he’d met. And of the one’s we’ve seen, except for the one that was insane, all the Tellarites have been argumentative.
As an aside, in ST:TNG, season 3, episode 4, “Who Watches the Watchers,” the Mintakans, a “proto-Vulcan” race, have brow ridges.
@67: Those helmets might just give the Romulans who wore them brow ridges (at least temporarily) if they didn’t already have them!
@76 If you have met Tellerites on several occasions, and they were all especially argumentative, that suggests that any you meet in future will also be especially argumentative.
They might not be, but unless you have some particular reason to think otherwise, that should be your expectation.
Was just coming in to ask what all everyone’s using to watch episodes now. After it disappeared from Netflix I could still use Prime, but it’s gone from there now. Is Paramount+ the only offering at this point?
@13 This statement always reminds me of the England Game aka Englandspiel. You may recollect that captured British and Dutch agents in WW2 Holland were tortured into decoding their own earlier radio messages to Britain, and into continuing to radio Britain from inside a jail cell. And, in many cases, into denouncing other allied agents known to them. At its peak, practically the entire SOE network in Holland was run by Abwehr. Torture worked for them.
Meanwhile, German agents in Britain mostly ended up at the MI5 interrogation centre at Latchmere House, Camp 020.
They were left under no illusions that they were guilty of a capital crime and that justice not merely permitted but required their deaths. The only reason not to hang them was that they had or were expected in future to provide useful, actionable, reliable information. Otherwise, they were hanged.
They could not be physically injured during their imprisonment, but the stand-up, sleep deprivation, heat exhaustion and so on were permitted. Post-war legal definitions would have considered this torture, but there was no legal or treaty definition of torture at the time.
Most of them broke, and the entire German intelligence network in Britain was run by British intelligence throughout most of the war.
OTOH, Axis POWs were perfectly aware they could not be killed or permanently harmed, and almost never broke. Nor did they feel guilt about fighting a war in their country’s uniform. Information might be tricked out of them, but not more than that.
The point is that torture is like any other incentive scheme: It might work, but only as long as you can tell if it is working. Otherwise, you can no longer apply the incentive.
The Englandspiel relied on the fact that the Germans could tell if their captives had decrypted their own earlier radio messages. When the British changed their coding system so that agents could no longer do that, the game became impossible.
Latchmere House relied on its filing system, and other sources of allied intelligence such as cryptanalysis. Their prisoners never knew what information their captors already had, could verify, or were interested in, so the safest plan for a prisoner who wished to live was to tell everything honestly and hope for the best.
The problem with most fictional interrogations is not that they include torture, but that they don’t include verification of the prisoners story, or concealing information about what the interrogator already knows.
ad: Your argument (ahem) doesn’t really hold water. I find myself reminded of a great line from Justified: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you’ve run into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” If every Tellarite you’ve met is argumentative, that just means that you’ve argued with all of them. Doesn’t mean they’re all argumentative.
Plus, both Sarek and Gav are diplomats, for whom oratory and arguing is part of their job.
Sorry, I’m sticking with my Sarek-is-a-racist position.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@83/krad: Except that later canon has reaffirmed that Tellarite culture encourages argument; an arc in season 4 of ENT will establish that Tellarites exchange insults as a polite greeting, and Prodigy‘s introduction of Jankom Pog also played on the Tellarite fondness for arguing, by having Dal use reverse psychology to get him to agree to help out.
Although that doesn’t mean Sarek’s statement was correct, because he said Tellarites argue for no reason, and the reason is that it’s a cultural norm for them, no doubt based on values and attitudes that have meaning within their culture. In SCE: Aftermath, I suggested that it’s because they prize honesty and see courtesy as deception, though I think I was unconsciously cribbing that from the Zaldans in TNG: “Coming of Age.”
Sarek could be a racist (in fact, many Vulcans are) and his comment could still be true. Gav could have agreed with Sarek and he’d still form it as an arguement. It’s been defining element of Tellarites ever since they were introduced. Unless you want us to think that the vast majority of them are soft spoken and introspective and we’re just really unlucky at seeing them. Kind of like how everyone says how talkative Morn is but we never hear him utter a single word.
The Mintakans of “Who Watches the Watchers” (ST:TNG, season 3, ep 4) are “proto-Vulcans” and have distinct brow ridges, by the way. This may or may not suggest that this physiological feature was once widespread as the general Vulcan genotype, such as skin color and eye shape.
(We only see the one village of Mintakans, so of course we have no idea of the genetic variation on that planet.)
And those Romulan helmets? If I remember them correctly, if you didn’t have brow ridges before wearing one, you might have them afterwards …
(Oh dear, I appear to have repeated myself … sorry.)
@74/Krad: My point is people might remember the main plot (hiding his medical condition), but few would remember the racist remarks. Nostalgia can be deceiving.
I loved the use of ‘pink skin’! It shows that the galaxy wasn’t full of SNAGS – ‘sensitive new age guys’. Sometimes, even friends have issues that need to be worked on. Plus, it’s fun watching the Federation getting taken down a moral prig point or two.
Archer’s choice here is basically if a American soldier found a British listening post nearby the Germans after WW1 and then blew it up.
His actions are of a profoundly awful ally and show humans are not to be trusted to be friends.
@89: Except humans have never been at war with Andorians, there wasn’t a treaty preventing that and Archer didn’t blow anything up.
Honestly, all this comparing the episode to the Americans siding against their allies the British, with an unspoken “because that would never happen”, makes me wonder if anyone still remembers that a decade after WW2 the Americans sided against Britain, France and Israel during the Suez Crisis…
@89/C.T. Phipps: Except that in the 22nd century, the analogy for America isn’t Earth — it’s Vulcan. Vulcan is the first-world cultural-imperialist superpower bossing around less advanced cultures “for their own good,” and Earth is a second-world nation that’s been under Vulcan’s political and economic sway for generations and is now trying to assert its independence. Vulcan and Andoria are the two superpowers butting heads in a cold war, like America and the USSR, and Earth is one of the smaller nations caught in between them.
That’s the cool thing about Enterprise — the way it flips the script and lets us see galactic politics from the perspective of the colonized rather than the colonizer.
Except the Vulcans aren’t the colonizers and bluntly there is very little that indicates the Andorians grievances against the Vulcans are justified.
The Andorians are engaged in assault, kidnapping, intimidation, and presumably illegal “inspections.”
@92/C.T. Phipps: I’m not talking about Andoria, I’m talking about Earth. My point is that it’s a mistake to treat 22nd-century Earth as an analogy for 20th-century America, because ENT flips the TOS/TNG-era script and makes Earth the second-world power, while Vulcan and Andoria are the cold-warring superpowers. As this episode made clear, neither Vulcan nor Andoria is blameless; as in every war, whether hot or cold, both sides commit immoral acts.
It will be made clearer as the series goes on that Vulcan is indeed a colonialist superpower in its relations with other worlds in its sphere of influence. You don’t have to occupy or invade a nation physically to be colonialist — it’s more a matter of cultural imperialism and political domination. 22nd-century Vulcan is analogous to the 19th-century British Empire or post-WWII America, engaged in what it believes is a civilizing mission to other worlds that entitles it to act imperiously toward them, as we’ve seen with its suppression of Earth warp research and will see in their relations with other worlds in upcoming episodes.
@93 – Quite right. And by the 23rd century, the Federation is the cultural imperialists, showing up at first contacts and telling the inhabitants everything they’re doing wrong. Everybody, Humans, Vulcans, Andorians and the rest get into the act under the guise of the Federation and Starfleet.
@3/cap-mjb: “Interesting that Archer knows about Surak: He’s obviously picking up bits of Vulcan culture.”
Archer’s knowledge of Surak makes all the more obvious how unbelievable it is that Kirk has apparently never heard of him in TOS: “The Savage Curtain” (as pointed out in Phil Farrand’s Nitpicker’s Guide for Classic Trekkers).
The one time I wrote a Star Trek fanfic, I had the 20-year-old Montgomery Scott, who hadn’t even entered Starfleet Academy yet, already know who Surak was. I did this in the full awareness that it sat uneasily with “The Savage Curtain”, and I didn’t care.
Was it ever established that the Andorians had a similarly superficial slur that they used for Vulcans? It occurs to me that the Vulcans played by Caucasian actors had pretty much the same skin color as Caucasian humans. So, “pink-skin” seems like an odd way for Shran to distinguish the humans he met from the Vulcans.
“Round-ears,” as one example, would make more sense.
@96/terracinque: Vulcans have a subtly greenish-gold complexion. I think I’ve seen a book or two where Andorians addressed Vulcans as “green-skins.”
And the point is to differentiate humans from Andorians, not from Vulcans. Andorians have round ears too.
It is kind of amazing that vandalizing a monastery and taking a bunch of Vulcan citizens and allies hostage isn’t also a violation of the treaty.
@@@@@ 98, yeah but the Andorians proved Vulcan bad faith. Their suspicions were totally justified. Blaming the Andorians for breaking a treaty the Vulcans were already trashing seems counter-productive.
@100/roxana: Yes. More than that: It was the Vulcans’ initial treaty violation (and affront against their own people’s history and heritage) in using the monastery as a listening post that compelled the Andorians to raid it in order to prove that violation. Certainly their methods were deplorable (especially the torture), but it was the Vulcan violation that provoked the Andorian response.
@100/princessroxana: You think invading a monastery, taking hostages, causing property damage and threatening lives is morally equal to passively monitoring an adversary?
I say a breech of treaty is a breech of treaty and the Vulcans deliberately used the monks as humanoid shields and that is despicable. Also if the Vulcans hadn’t violated the treaty the Andorians wouldn’t have either. Cause and effect.
@102/terracinque: I think “passively monitoring an adversary” is downplaying it a bit naively. If it had been that innocuous, why would they be doing it in secret, and violating one of their own people’s monasteries to do it? The devious way they went about it suggests that they had some more malicious intent for whatever intelligence they gathered. There is no “passive monitoring” in war; all intelligence gathering is done with the goal of hurting or defeating the enemy, which is why espionage is considered such a serious crime. The High Command was trying to get an edge in their ongoing conflict with Andoria, and any such edge would most likely have eventually come at the cost of Andorian lives.
Of course, that doesn’t make Shran’s response any better, but as I said before, both sides in any war commit atrocities.
@104/CLB: Of course the Vulcans shouldn’t have been doing what they were doing. But all treaty violations are not equal, just as all crimes are not equal, and what the Andorians did was much more wrong and destabilizing.
@105/terracinque: And you’re ignoring my point, which is that it’s too simplistic to look at the act in isolation and ignore its larger context. A “minor” act like spying can have massive consequences if the intelligence thus gathered facilitates a deadly attack or act of sabotage. Just intercepting a message at the right time can make the difference between winning a battle and losing it.
What I’m saying is that the Vulcans wouldn’t have engaged in such a “minor” violation if they hadn’t intended to get something more major out of it. I mean, they violated the sanctity of one of their own monasteries, an action that would surely have provoked… well, not outrage back home, since it’s Vulcans, but intense, possibly career-ending disapproval for the officials who okayed it if the act were discovered (which it was). So they wouldn’t have risked such a major scandal without some big payoff in mind.
Anyway, who cares if the offenses are “equal?” It’s not a race. They’re both wrong. I see no reason to side with one wrong because it’s theoretically “less wrong” than the other. Not everything requires picking a side.
@106 – That’s assuming that the majority of Vulcan citizens would disapprove of the spying and the use of the monastery. For all we know, the vast majority would be totally in favour.
I strongly disliked this episode because it showed that Archer would compromise the international relationships of Earth’s allies out of a petty grudge.
Yes, Earth isn’t America while Vulcan is.
However, Earth has a longstanding treaty with Vulcan and ties while they don’t know anything about the Andorians.
So Archer immediately throws the Vulcans under the bus.
@108/C.T. Phipps: But the Vulcans were violating their own treaty with Andoria. That was a crime. Covering up a crime because it was committed by an ally is not integrity, it’s corruption. Archer didn’t act on a “grudge,” but on the moral responsibility not to conceal a crime.
I can’t add anything new to the conversation, but agree with earlier comments and the review: this was the first good episode in Enterprise…when i first started to watch the series, this episode helped me to not give up on the series fully…
The comments on Vulcan mating rituals are more than “snotty” — they’re sexually intimidating. Dude wasn’t just trolling her culture. It was the second time he’d tried to make her feel threatened with sexual assault, so “snotty” is not appropriate. Anyway…
A mighty good episode, but I don’t know why they didn’t just transport phase pistols down there instead of two expendable crew people and a main caster. If the transporter is supposed to be genuinely scary because it sometimes messes up, the show isn’t doing a good job of showing it.
I can’t say I fault the writers for “pink skin.” If you’re showing the racism of individuals, you’re not going to show them sitting around trying to make sure their slur is inclusive. Plus, I’d be hard pressed to think of an alternative: smooth forehead? Round ear? Anyway, Archer and Trip aren’t even pink in tone.
“Flathead” seems the obvious option, though it would apply to most humanoids from the Andorians’ perspective.