“The Augments”
Written by Michael Sussman
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 4, Episode 6
Production episode 082
Original air date: November 12, 2004
Date: May 27, 2154
Captain’s star log. After getting scenes from the last two episodes, we have Archer climbing up an access tube. He manages to seal off the computer room where, conveniently, everyone was being imprisoned by the Augments. The various viruses are everywhere else—including the access tube Archer is in, and there’s no time for him to evacuate. The transporter can’t beam him out that deep in the station, so he orders T’Pol to blow a hole in the hull that will cause decompression and send him out into space. That works, and they beam him aboard before he dies in the vacuum of space.
On the Bird-of-Prey, Soong and the Augments (totally the name of my next band…) pass into Klingon territory, where they should be safe, what with being in a Klingon ship and all. Soong is pleased to see that the Enterprise is holding station at Cold Station 12, saying Archer isn’t foolish enough to follow. This prompts Malik to inform his “father” that Archer is dead. Soong is furious that Malik let loose all those pathogens and killed the personnel on CS12 without a direct order from Soong, and threatens to assign him to the targ-pit if he disobeys again. He then sends Malik on a repair assignment that Malik believes is beneath him.
The Enterprise crew release the CS12 personnel to start the laborious task of decontaminating the station (which will take the better part of a year), and then go after Soong. Tucker is able to make Enterprise’s warp signature appear to be a Klingon ship on sensors.
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Soong sets course for the Briar Patch, which the Klingons call Klach D’Kel Bracht. Malik is pissed, as it just means they’re going to hide again. Malik brings up Botany Bay, which Soong dismisses as a myth. But it’s believed that Khan Noonien Singh and his followers left Earth in Botany Bay, which Malik says was a mistake, one they shouldn’t repeat.
Malik visits Soong in the lab. Soong asks him not to disagree with him in front of everyone. Malik thinks that family should be allowed to disagree, then changes the subject to discuss the embryos. Malik is horrified to learn that Soong is adjusting their genetic makeup to breed out aggressiveness, and criticizes Soong for messing with their genome. (Never mind that they wouldn’t exist without someone messing with their genome.) Soong tries to explain that his techniques are way better than what was done at the turn of the millennium—and then they’re interrupted by Enteprise’s arrival.
A battle ensues—with Malik rather shocked to learn that Archer’s still alive—which Soong gets out of by shooting the Denobulan pilot they took captive last time out in an escape pod. Enterprise is forced to rescue her, giving the Bird-of-Prey plenty of time to escape.
While trying to track the Bird-of-Prey, Enterprise encounters a real Klingon ship. Archer manages to bluff his way through the conversation thanks to Sato having upgraded the universal translator to include more Klingon dialects, and by saying that he’s got Chancellor M’Rek on board, having classified negotiations with the Orions. The Klingon captain makes assumptions about M’Rek’s interest in Orion women that helps sell the bit, and Enterprise is let go.
Malik convinces Persis to mutiny against Soong, as he’s an ordinary human, and he’s trying to make the embryos into weaklings. Persis agrees, and the Augments all band together to lock Soong in his cabin. Malik now plans to use the viruses he stole from CS12 to poison the Qu’vat Klingon colony, hoping it will spark a war between Earth and the Empire.
Persis visits Soong, saying she only went along with the mutiny because she was outnumbered. She helps Soong into an escape pod. Malik later figures out that she was the one who freed him and kills her with a d’k tahg.
Enterprise rescues Soong, and the latter helps them track the Bird-of-Prey. They have to travel at warp five, as they’re worried about Malik releasing the viruses, but that messes with their disguise. Sure enough, a Klingon battle cruiser shows up to challenge them. Enterprise manages to disable the Klingon ship and continue on its way.
Malik prepares to fire a bioweapon onto the Qu’vat colony, but Enterprise arrives in the nick of time to destroy it. A battle ensues, which Enterprise wins. Rather than face capture, Malik destroys the ship—but also manages to escape himself, transporting himself to Enterprise and assaulting Soong. While Malik is choking Soong, Archer shoots him in the back, blowing a hole in this thoracic region, killing him.
Soong is brought back to prison, with Archer saying that his work won’t be destroyed, but archived.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Tucker pulls the old adjust-the-warp-signature trick to disguise Enterprise as a Klingon ship.
The gazelle speech. After seeming to reconsider his position on genetic engineering given the final fate of his father last time, Archer finally comes down on the side of keeping it banned, quoting one of the scientists who worked on the project to create the Augments who said, “Superior ability breeds superior ambition.” That scientist was later killed by an Augment…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol confronts Tucker with the fact that he’s been avoiding her since she returned from Vulcan, and Tucker admits that he has. He also admits that what T’Pol did—marry Koss to allow her mother to have her job back—was incredibly admirable, and says that they never would’ve worked as a couple anyhow…
Florida Man. Florida Man Reconciles With Alien Babe, Agrees To Be Just Friends.
Qapla’. We meet two Klingon captains in this episode. One is incredibly gullible, the other incredibly incompetent. Not a banner day for the Empire, this…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Malik and Persis discuss mutiny as pillow talk for the second straight episode, and then later Malik kills Persis for betraying him. Bros before hos, I guess?
More on this later… At the end of the episode, Soong thinks that he should abandon genetic engineering in favor of cybernetics and artificial intelligence, and muses that it may take a few generations to get it right, a hilariously clumsy bit of foreshadowing of the work of his descendent Noonien Soong in creating Data, Lore, and B-4.
In addition, Soong dismisses the story of Khan and his followers escaping Earth on Botany Bay as a myth, but it will be proven correct in the original series’ “Space Seed” (and again, after a fashion, in Star Trek Into Darkness) when Khan and his gaggle around found by Starfleet.
I’ve got faith…
“Is there something we can do to keep from showing up on their sensors?”
“I could paint a bird of prey on our hull.”
–Archer looking for suggestions, and Tucker proposing a hilariously low-tech one.
Welcome aboard. Back again are Brent Spiner as Soong, Richard Riehle as Lucas, Alec Newman as Malik, Abby Brammell as Persis, and Adam Grimes as Lokesh. Mark Rolston, last seen as Kuroda in “Canamar,” and also in TNG’s “Eye of the Beholder” as the memory of Pierce, plays the Klingon captain. Spiner will next be seen on Picard, reprising the roles of Data and Lore, as well as playing two more members of the Soong family, Adam (in the twenty-first century in season two) and Altan (at the turn of the twenty-fifth in seasons one and three).
Trivial matters: This concludes the three-part arc begun in “Borderland” and continued in “Cold Station 12.” T’Pol and Tucker discuss her wedding to Koss in “Home.”
The turbulent region of space called the Briar Patch was first seen in the movie Insurrection; this episode implies that Soong gave it that name. This episode also establishes that it’s the same region as Klach D’Kel Bracht, the site of a great Klingon battle against the Romulans, as established in DS9’s “Blood Oath.”
The Klingon chancellor is given the name M’Rek. It’s unclear if this is the same chancellor we saw in “The Expanse,” and possibly also the chancellor we saw in “Broken Bow” (played by a different actor, but with the same forehead crest), or if this is a new chancellor.
It will be established in “Affliction” later this season that some of the embryos survived the destruction of the Bird-of-Prey, and will be experimented on by Klingon scientists on the Qu’vat colony.
Any similarities between the final scene on the bridge of the Bird-of-Prey before Malik blew it up and the final scene on the bridge of the Reliant before Khan blew it up in The Wrath of Khan is not in the least bit coincidental.
It’s been a long road… “He ran from his enemies rather than face them.” One of the selling points of Enterprise was that it would be a more primitive time than we were used to from the previous three spinoffs, which all took place in the twenty-fourth century. And yet, this episode’s plot hinges on two bits of technobabble—a perfectly working transporter and disguising one’s warp signature—that are right out of the TNG, DS9, and Voyager technobabble handbooks.
That wouldn’t bother me so much if the rest of the story was compelling, but it really isn’t. Scripter Michael Sussman defaults to the big dumb warrior stereotype of Klingons, making Archer’s ability to defeat them verbally and in battle ridiculously easy and no kind of challenge, which does neither the Klingons nor Archer any favors. It’s hard to be impressed with Archer’s accomplishments when it’s so easy and it’s hard to take the Klingons at all seriously as opponents when they’re this dumb and incompetent.
And then there’s the fact that Alec Newman’s Malik remains a completely nowhere antagonist. Making matters worse is that Sussman’s script and LeVar Burton’s direction try to re-create the climax of The Wrath of Khan, but all that does is remind you that Newman is no Ricardo Montalban.
In the abstract, this story at least attempts to give more weight to the genetic engineering ban that has continued into the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries. Having Malik and his gaggle turn into interstellar terrorists adds more fodder to the justification for the ban (as does what happens in “Affliction” and “Divergence” later this season). Alas, the execution doesn’t entirely succeed. In particular, it was frustrating to have Malik complain about Soong adjusting the embryos’ genetic coding and Soong not making the obvious rejoinder, which is that the whole point is to be able to adjust genetic coding. That entire scene was a frustrating failure to deliver what should’ve been an important conversation on the subject.
Spiner’s performance as Soong is better here than it was in “Cold Station 12” (though not as strong as it was in “Borderland”). However, whatever good will his performance has engendered is pissed away by the clumsy-as-hell “maybe I’ll try cybernetics now” musing at the ending, where he does everything but wink at the camera.
The best continuity porn is that which also works as a good story and this three-parter, in the end, fails.
Warp factor rating: 3
Rewatcher’s note: We’ll be taking next week off for Labor Day, and be back on Monday the 11th with the rewatch of “The Forge.”
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author guest at Dragon Con 2023 this weekend in Atlanta. He’ll be doing a metric buttload of programming, including workshops, autographings, readings, and a lot of panel discussions on a wide variety of topics. Check out his insanely busy schedule here.
