“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.
Buy the Book
System Collapse
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.
“You’re a bright boy, Malik. You’ll figure it out.”
So it ends with…a bit of a whimper? It feels a bit like the last act of a movie and not one of the good ones. Phlox is barely in it, Mayweather and Sato are just bodies on the bridge, with Reed not doing much better aside from cutting through Tucker’s sarcasm to offer a genuine engineering solution, being the one to suggest adjusting the warp signature instead of a new paint job. There’s precious little opportunity for characterisation, aside from one scene of Tucker and T’Pol discussing how her marriage affects them.
In fact, it feels like Soong and Persis are pretty much the only real characters in it at times. The latter becomes yet another character to be killed off without much fanfare, while the former finally decides to reject his creations and throw himself wholeheartedly in with Enterprise.
Neither of the climaxes really has any impact. Malik deciding to blow up his ship rather than accept defeat just comes across as a combination of Wrath of Khan and ‘Balance of Terror’, and is largely rendered meaningless by the “Surprise, he’s still alive…somehow” twist (are we meant to assume he beamed over?), just in time for him to get killed for real less than a minute later, thanks to the weapon that he shrugged off a moment earlier suddenly being able to drill a hole in him. (Did Archer dial up the setting?)
It’s interesting that Archer reveals Soong’s work hasn’t been destroyed but kept in storage in case it can be used one day. I think people often forget one key line from “Doctor Bashir, I Presume”: “DNA resequencing for any reason other than repairing serious birth defects is illegal.” (Emphasis mine.) Whilst it seems to be a blanket ban in the era of Enterprise and Strange New Worlds, it does appear that Soong’s dream of using it to for genuine medical application has become more acceptable two hundred years hence. (We even see it happening in Voyager’s ‘Lineage’.) It’s just the “Better, faster, stronger” aspect of genetic engineering that people aren’t comfortable with.
Even though it feels like an awkward holdover, the resolution of the cliffhanger is quite good, with Archer resorting to a rather extreme method. I’m not sure his being exposed to space is entirely accurate but it’s an improvement on the days when everyone thought you explode.
Richard Riehle gets guest star billing despite appearing for less than a minute in the pre-credits. Kristen Ariza gets added to the speaking Augment line-up, credited as “Augment #1”: To some of us, she’s still best known as one of the original line-up of the 90s Tomorrow People.
Persis’ death was cut by Channel 4, who ended the scene on Malik saying “Your heart’s beating faster. Perhaps it’s trying to tell me something.” You can just about work out she’s been killed from the context but she basically just disappears.
As some others pointed out in comments for previous episodes, it does make some sense to assume a constant shield-vs-transporter arms race. And also a sensor-vs-ecm arms race. So I’m not too unhappy with those bits of technobabble.
One of my pet peeves, they are throwing distances and numbers around without any feeling for what they mean. Warp factors are notoriously hard to pin down, but some continuity person should have done the numbers on how many seconds of flight time those 80.000 km make at any sort of FTL speed. Less than a third of a second. And .3 lightyears to visual in two minutes? That Klingon battlecruiser is fast …
You should give Soong a little credit for realizing that he lost control of his family, and the writers for having him try to regain it with the old patterns and fail. Targ pit, indeed. And if that isn’t a lesson, go to bed without any dessert. Did that actually work for 10-year-old augments?
I’m surprised you think so little of Alec Newman’s performance, Keith. I thought he was excellent. But then, I’m a sucker for a euphonious British accent.
I appreciate it that this trilogy took a more nuanced view than just “Playing God is eevul!” I liked Soong pointing out that the problem wasn’t that genetic engineering is automatically bad, but that the Augments were specifically bred to heighten aggression and ambition, and that a more responsible approach to augmentation could be a positive.
I hate the opening, though. I’m so tired of the cliche of people being blown into space and instantly freezing (a mistake that Picard season 3 made as well). That’s getting it exactly backward, and it’s a mistake that people should be able to recognize if they thought it through. It’s common knowledge that you freeze faster in water than in air, because there’s a denser medium that conducts and convects heat away more quickly. Thus, it follows that in vacuum, with virtually no medium to conduct or convect heat away, you’d freeze far slower. Vacuum is an INSULATOR, dammit. Everyone who’s ever used a thermos bottle should know that. In real life, spacesuits and ships need cooling systems to keep from overheating. “Space is cold,” yeah, but only in the dark parts after they’ve had enough time for the heat to radiate slowly away. In direct sunlight, space can be extremely hot.
This one’s definitely the weakest of the trilogy, and (not coincidentally) the one that leads the hardest into TWOK pastiche. If I could have just one wish, it would be a 25-year moratorium on all references to that movie across all Trek media. It’s been 4 decades already; move on!
Also, I feel that the near-winking-into-the-camers line about Soong needing a few generations to perfect cybernetics only makes sense if you assume that the Soongs are all clones.
@krad, I think you’re quite right that this arc isn’t the Best version of itself, but one still feels you’re underrating it by a notch or two: if nothing else I feel Malik works beautifully as a Khan Noonien Singh writ small* as well as a Classical Tragedy – a brilliant youth condemned by his own choices to become a tyrant who barely registers in the pages of history, even as a might-have-been, gaining a fleeting chance at greatness only at the cost of his own family.
If nothing else, I appreciate that Malik’s decision to become a tyrant consistently makes him look small, rather than Ricardo Montalban Romantic-unless-you-meet-him (It occurs to me that he’s not only Khan writ small, he’s Khan stripped of all the glamour that fools some into thinking him admirable).
I also appreciate that Doctor Soong is given such a warts-and-all portrayal as an extremely clever man blinded by his own high-handed idealism: the story is as much his Tragedy as that of Malik and his brethren, yet the saddest thing of all is that he only barely accepts the fact.
*Though it bears pointing out that he still manages to have far more of an impact on Galactic politics than Khan Noonien Singh ever came close to doing: one small slip and a feral child raised on a nameless ball of rock starts a war that could change the course of Galactic history beyond recognition (Heck, if Archer had been even a little less lucky with that second Klingon cruiser, Malik could have done all that and gotten away free & clear to boot).
Getting away from what made me sad, I definitely enjoyed this episode as something of a tour-de-force from Jonathan Archer: shooting himself into the vacuum of space to save others from a Molotov cocktail of horrible diseases would have been an Awesomely Heroic sacrifice if the transporter hadn’t worked; the sheer audacity of his bluff with the first Klingon ship was delightful (and excellent proof that his time dealing with Klingons was not wasted); I’m reasonably sure that his very, very risky plan to deal with the second cruiser succeeded mostly because the Klingon captain was left speechless with outrage at the sheer lunatic audacity of the gambit (and I wonder if Archer got his opening mostly because he was deploying technology hopelessly obsolescent by Klingon standards, which would help explain their lack of planned countermeasures); his repeated ability to NOT DIE when pitted against a really, really angry Augment in single combat, capped with literally blowing a hole straight through Malik … all with the quiet air of a decent man handling dirty business (and not a little compassion even for Doctor Soong, a man he visibly detests).
I’m not going to lie, understated bad*** Jonathan Archer is the BEST Archer and this episode is a perfect Exhibit A for the case that Jonathan Archer is pretty darned awesome even as (In-universe) a work-in-process rough draft of a Starfleet Captain.
Summed up, I’d call this a pretty solid arc, even if it’s middling rather than Great.
I didn’t mind the wink to the audience at the end. It does make me wonder about the circumstances of how his android research was carried on. Did he already have children who would continue his work? If so, it seems odd for him to be devoting so much effort to his surrogate augment kids. I’d think that would just breed resentment in his actual offspring. Or did he have kids of his own after this? Did he end up being one of those convicts who marries a woman on the outside and starts a family through conjugal visits? Maybe he started a family after he got out of prison. How long do they put you away for being a mad scientist in the future?
I’m probably thinking too much about this.
@4/jaimebabb: “Also, I feel that the near-winking-into-the-camers line about Soong needing a few generations to perfect cybernetics only makes sense if you assume that the Soongs are all clones.”
I don’t follow your reasoning. Surely the intent at the time, before PIC’s repeated stunt casting, was that Arik Soong’s descendants simply succeeded him in the new family business of cybernetics, the same way Sam & Jim Kirk followed their father into Starfleet, or Spock followed his father into diplomacy (eventually).
@5/ED: On the question of Khan’s impact on the galaxy, one of the many reasons I dislike TWOK is the way it squanders the potential of “Space Seed”‘s ending — “It would be interesting, Captain, to return to that world in a hundred years” — by reducing Khan’s ambitions to vengeance against one guy who wasn’t even responsible for the thing he was vengeful about. There were vague implications that he intended to use Genesis for conquest, but mainly it just seemed to be bait for Kirk. Imagine if it hadn’t been such a low-budget sequel that they had to limit the story mostly to two ships, and if we could’ve actually seen the impact Khan and his people could’ve had on the galaxy.
A pretty meh episode by any standards, but I liked the nice little bits of continuity about Klingons being territorial as all hell. Never had a problem with Trip changing up the engines so they looked like a Klingon ship if they weren’t under any duress.
@5. ED made good points on why the Klingon captains acted as they did; primitive solutions actually working because nobody would expect to be torn apart by a towing cable that you might not even be able to detect until you trace it back. One thing that bothered me here is how Enterprise managed to cripple Malik’s ship with one shot; an unarmored section is one thing, but don’t Klingon ships have shields? Or are they sufficiently at the bottom of the quadrant’s technology pyramid that shields are only fitted to a handful of ships and armor plating is still preferable both from a cost and “honor” point of view?
@3. ChristopherLBennett
I always thought it was the atmosphere that got blown out along with Archer than was condensing and freezing onto him, not necessarily his brief time as a popsicle that froze him a bit.
@7. Imagine if it hadn’t been such a low-budget sequel that they had to limit the story mostly to two ships, and if we could’ve actually seen the impact Khan and his people could’ve had on the galaxy.
I imagine that would end up being something like we see in our modern movies and TV series — big, bloated and messy to the point we start asking, “Wouldn’t this have worked better as a two-hour movie with a considerably lower budget and a streamlined story?” Limitations are why TWOK worked.
@8/FRT: “I always thought it was the atmosphere that got blown out along with Archer than was condensing and freezing onto him, not necessarily his brief time as a popsicle that froze him a bit.”
The slight amount of atmosphere and water vapor in that lock would’ve almost instantly dissipated into vacuum rather than condensing on Archer. There’s nothing to push it against him; it would expand away from him at great speed. Also, water doesn’t freeze in vacuum, but vaporizes, the exact opposite.
One of the most accurate descriptions of the effects of vacuum exposure in the popular media is, surprisingly, from Doctor Who, a show not usually known for good science. From the Peter Capaldi episode “Oxygen”:
Malik in my view was always the cautionary tale. Khan was the best of the tyrants. Malik is the run of the mill. A young punk full of piss and vinegar. He thought he was entitled to the world, but he didn’t learn his history, never understood WHY all of the augments lost, WHY Khan ran off to space. Superior ability, superior ambition, but not superior outcomes. All the ego to think that he was somehow the exception.
Also Khan loved his crew like family. Malik treated his family like expendable pawns and obstacles.
Tucker saying we probably wouldn’t have worked out echoes Spock not letting T’Pring in on his human transformation a century (or two decades) later a human trying to spare a Vulcan pain and aggravation when they have enough on their plate. It’s endlessly fascinating seeing humans being considerate of Vulcan feelings when that’s not really a thing for Vulcans.
I feel rather bad for Persis, but I feel she also got what was coming to her. This started with her betraying Raakin, and ended with her betraying Malik. Whereas Malik had an overendowment of hubris, Persis lacked foresight.
So I think it not only demonstrates why the Augment Ban is so rigorously enforced, but also why the Augments themselves always failed.
@7/CLB – Yes; my point is that there’s no way that Arik should be able to realistically plan for what several generations of his descendants will be doing. Besides of which, he’s already relatively old, in prison, and we’ve had no indication that he has a natural child (and even if he did, is he going to ring them up and tell them that they need to drop what they’re doing and start studying cybernetics?). It’s just a dumb line that becomes marginally less dumb if you assume that he’s talking about clones.
@11/mr_d
I would agree with this assessment. One of the reasons why I didn’t mind showing the whole sordid Augment “family” dynamic is that it shows that, for all that they’re stronger and faster and maybe smarter than typical humans, they have no impulse control, no humility, and no particular skill at building community rather than just sociopathically maximizing their own individual power, and that‘s why they ultimately crumble–both here and, presumably, during the eugenics wars.
I thought about mentioning the freezing-in-a-vacuum nonsense, then decided, “Nah, Christopher will bitch about it in the comments….”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@7/CLB: I agree with @jamiebabb. In fact, it was Spiner playing Arik Soong that led me to the idea that all the Soong descendants are clones. Of course, I thought it started here, not in 2024 with Adam Soong. This also helps reconcile Alton Inigo Soong’s (LOL at A.I. Soong, was he even a real boy?) very existence with the fact that Noonian Soong and Julianna Trainor never had kids.
@12/jaimebabb: “Yes; my point is that there’s no way that Arik should be able to realistically plan for what several generations of his descendants will be doing.”
Except that Arik does nothing of the kind. The only thing he says is, “I doubt I’ll finish the work myself. Might take a generation or two.” In fact, it takes more like 6 to 8 generations. Arik has no firm master plan. He doesn’t have the next two centuries plotted out in detail. He doesn’t even specify generations of his family; he’s just using “generation” as a measure of time scale. He’s simply acknowledging that the idea is too complex to perfect in his lifetime. We know that what he sets in motion here will be followed up on by his descendants centuries down the road, but that’s because we’re looking at it in retrospect. It’s important not to mistake what we know of the future for what the characters know or intend. Happenstance always looks like planning or destiny when you look at it the wrong way around.
Indeed, we don’t know if any of Arik’s descendants other than Noonien and Altan would pursue his interest in cybernetics. For all we know, the subsequent 5-6 generations of Soongs pursued a variety of different fields of study, but then young Noonien learned about his ancestor Arik’s theories in cybernetics and was inspired to take it up himself.
“It’s just a dumb line that becomes marginally less dumb if you assume that he’s talking about clones.”
I don’t understand why you think clones would be any different in this regard than any other children. Clones are only copies of a person’s genes, not their mind or knowledge. A clone would still be a child, needing to be raised and educated from scratch the same as any other child. There’s no guarantee your clone would choose to follow in your footsteps any more than a regular child would. If anything, a clone child would probably be more likely to resist following in your footsteps, because they’d resent being in your shadow and want to assert their own identity. (Indeed, that’s literally Shinzon’s whole motivation in Star Trek Nemesis.)
As for the idea that the Soongs have to be clones because they all look like Brent Spiner, that’s taking casting in a dramatic production too literally. There are countless examples in fiction of actors playing their own characters’ ancestors or descendants, and most of the time it’s in non-SF contexts where there can’t be any “cloning” explanation. It’s just a conceit of drama, meant to suggest a family resemblance like, say, my close resemblance to my father. You’re supposed to pretend they just look similar instead of identical, the reverse of when someone is cast as a character’s younger self (e.g. Zoe Saldana or Celia Rose Gooding as Uhura, or Tom Hardy as Picard’s younger clone) and you have to pretend they do look the same when they actually don’t.
@krad
This episode’s biggest failure was its title. “The Augments” is a pretty weak name for the third episode of a trilogy about….. The Augments. The name would have worked better as the name for the first part of the trilogy. Something suitably pretentious like “How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth” (or maybe just “Serpent’s Tooth” could have filled for episode 3. Yes, TAS uses that title, but Trek has recycled titles before and Shakespeare is not around to complain. The bafflingly generic titles given to episodes in the Berman era are of a piece with its more-subdued-than TOS-tone. Second-to-last episode of SSN 2 Voyager – “Resolutions” was a better title for the earlier episode “Alliances” than the word “Alliances.” And “Death Wish” would have worked quite well for “Threshold.” But I kid. Love reading your columns! I am watching SSN 4 Enterprise right now l, and I think that its pedigree (its degree of fanservice) is being confused for its actual quality (not as good as season 3)
@15/CLB – I mean, the more elaborate version of the theory goes that he’s transferring memories and/or consciousness from one clone to the next using Stavros Keniclius’s technique. *shrug*
@16/Callenrush – I definitely agree about Berman-era titles, particularly on Enterprise, where I consistently need to consult an episode guide to remember which episode is about what. One of the things that I immediately liked about Discovery is that it brought back long, kind of pretentious titles.
@17/jaimebabb: “I mean, the more elaborate version of the theory goes that he’s transferring memories and/or consciousness from one clone to the next using Stavros Keniclius’s technique.”
If that were the case, it sure as hell wouldn’t be necessary for Arik Soong’s idle musing about cybernetics to result in Data’s eventual creation. There’s no actual hint that he has a multigenerational master plan with that specific end goal; that’s reading way too much into his actual lines. You’re starting with an arbitrary conclusion — the Soongs are clones — and inventing justifications for it, which is backward reasoning. If you start with the evidence and deduce purely from it, there is nothing in it that requires the Soongs to be clones. Like I said, that idea just comes from taking Spiner’s casting as his ancestors too literally. Is Worf, son of Mogh a clone of Colonel Worf? Is Kathryn Janeway a clone of Shannon O’Donnell? Is T’Pol a clone of T’Mir?
Anyway, I’m not convinced that Keniclius had the technology for that kind of consciousness transfer while he was on Earth. I assume he used Phylosian technology to create his clones, which is why they were 30 feet tall, the same size as the Phylosians used to be before their decline into their smaller, stunted forms. That didn’t come across well in the episode, but you can tell from the shots of the dead Phylosians and their gigantic ships.
Agreed with respect to the transporter, recalling that earlier they tried to restrict its use to cargo, thinking it wasn’t ready for prime time with respect to living beings.
Hell, even by the 23rd and 24th centuries it had a failure rate, increasingly infinitesimal to be sure. There’s Sonak’s messy death in ST:TMP, and McCoy’s, Pulaski’s, and Barclay’s reluctance to use it (interestingly the first 2 being medical officers).
Altering the warp signature, however (and the fact that the disguise fails at higher warp) suggests that it may well have started as an old “boomer” trick (since the old cargo ships never got up to that speed). In which case, it should have been Mayweather suggesting it.
@7. ChristopherLBennett: You’re not wrong – one of the reasons I’m deeply sorry INTO DARKNESS cast Mr Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan Noonien Singh rather than Garth of Izar (Who for my money makes a far more logical pick for a Starfleet black ops agent with his own agenda AND looks more like a Cumberbatch character to boot) is that the Kelvin timeline would have presented a perfect stage on which to explore how the Federation as a whole might have handled the crew of Botany Bay.
I must admit, however, that I strongly suspect that Khan might well have committed acts of piracy even had Ceti Alpha not tried to devour it’s new foster children: “The best of tyrants” is STILL a tyrant after all – he will hold what is his and he will take what he wants (whether or not the person currently holding it is finished with the property in question).
One also suspects that his grudge against Kirk predates the great dying on Ceti Alpha: after all, Kirk was the mere human who had beaten the supremo of supermen and denied him his first conquest in a new century.
It’s not hard to imagine that entirely sensible grudge being exponentially multiplied by a tyrant’s need to reassert control after finding himself powerless in the face of a natural disaster, by a broken man’s desperate desire for an enemy with a face, rather than a faceless nemesis stalking his dwindling familia.
It’s not really fair to James T. Kirk, but when we’re tyrants ever fair?
One last note: it strikes me that a scenario where Archer’s gamble with the grapple fails would be worthy of interest not only because Malik’s successful detonation of that plague torpedo would trigger a Diplomatic Crisis involving (at the very least) the Klingons, United Earth and the Vulcans (With the Andorians and the Romulans almost certain to take a hand too) but because the absence of Archer’s Enterprise means Malik almost certainly gets away to raise a new, enormous generation of Augments (Presumably as a wildcard in the extremely unsettled Astro-political situation).
I wonder what sort of galaxy Khan Noonien Singh et al might awaken to in such a timeline?
@19/markvolund: “Hell, even by the 23rd and 24th centuries it had a failure rate, increasingly infinitesimal to be sure. There’s Sonak’s messy death in ST:TMP, and McCoy’s, Pulaski’s, and Barclay’s reluctance to use it (interestingly the first 2 being medical officers).”
Except the whole point of the TMP transporter accident was that it was something that normally never would’ve happened; it was a consequence of Kirk rushing the ship’s launch and bypassing the normal safety checks. So it isn’t a reflection on the normal reliability of transporters. In fact, every transporter accident we’ve seen in Trek is the result of some exceptional circumstance — an unknown substance or energy affecting the system or the ship being under attack or other duress. And even so, very few of those mishaps are fatal. There are only four canonical instances of fatal transporter accidents — one during the development of the tech (as we’ll see in “Daedalus”), the one in TMP, and two in DS9 that were explicitly or implicitly the result of sabotage.
So if anything, the evidence is that transporters are an exceptionally safe form of travel, and the fears of characters like McCoy and Barclay are meant to be irrational phobias. (I don’t count Pulaski since they just gender-flipped McCoy when they created her.)
@20/ED: My problem with the idea of a younger Garth of Izar as a bad guy is that the “Whom Gods Destroy” made it clear that Garth was a great, admired captain before the accident that drove him insane. Indeed, one of my regrets is that Discovery and Strange New Worlds have missed the opportunity to establish Garth as one of Starfleet’s most acclaimed and heroic captains in the 2250s, as he logically should have been.
If there’s a common theme throughout these mini-arcs in season 4 is that most of them have difficulty in delivering a satisfying well plotted ending that pleases everyone. The Augment arc is probably the most egregious example of the bunch. I don’t find Malik’s character and actions nuanced at all. He’s very much a second-rate Khan, and this episode tries to lean on the Khan parallels more than any other.
Even though it tries to salvage Arik Soong after he was mostly left in the dust in the second entry in the trilogy, there’s only so much there that Spiner can work with. He’s reacting to events rather than creating them. That makes for a very passive uninteresting character compared to the scheming version we get in part 1. And I can’t help but think of TNG’s “Brothers”. Malik and the Augments betraying Soong feels eerily similar to Lore’s unprovoked attack on Noonian.
It would be easy to say Sussman dropped the ball with this one, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. From what I gather (from a pre-demise Coto interview), season 4 was very much a group effort, with everyone working each story together before assigning each part to a writer. And this being the first real three parter arc for the staff, I could see this being the case of them stumbling in their first effort, and Sussman just happened to be assigned the final part.
@23/Eduardo: “From what I gather (from a pre-demise Coto interview), season 4 was very much a group effort, with everyone working each story together before assigning each part to a writer.”
That’s pretty much how every writer’s room works. Episodes are conceived in a group brainstorming session by the whole staff, then specific scripts are assigned to individual writers or teams, then the staff reviews and revises together, and the showrunner does the final polish to maintain a consistent voice.
@25/Christopher: But as I understand, it wasn’t as group oriented in the earlier seasons of Enterprise, or most of Voyager (especially after Piller left). It was more of a top down environment. The immense amount of Berman/Braga story credits in the early seasons certainly imply as much, and I recall one old Sussman interview where he confirms that he and the other writers didn’t have as much of a guiding hand in the story breaking process until the later seasons.
I just have to say something about ‘Strange New Worlds’ regarding genetic engineering. The show seems to change its mind rather quickly about genetic engineering. In the pilot, they use genetic engineering to affect first contact by altering the landing party to appear to be members of the alien race. Within a few episodes, genetic engineering is now outlawed in the Federation. It’s something that bugs me.
@26/John Bohlke: There’s a difference between a temporary genetic alteration to disguise someone as an alien and a permanent genetic augmentation to give someone superhuman abilities. Nobody ever said all genetic medicine was banned, just transhuman augmentations.
@22. ChristopherLBennett: I would definitely have been interested in seeing Garth of Izar before that rather nasty accident (and faulty repair work) drove him to madness* (If only because it would be a nice challenge for an actor to present a superb Starfleet captain, while still suggesting that Garth’s madness brought latent tendencies to the surface and twisted his existing personality to boot).
*Please note that my presumption when describing Cumberbatch-as-Garth was that the poor fellow would suffer a comparable experience in the Kelvin timeline, but that Admiral Marcus would be sinister enough to put the man to work after some ‘running repairs’ rather than put him through a full cure.
I’ve tended to imagine the younger Garth as having a little bit of Douglas MacArthur to him: he’s someone practically born to greatness who works his tail off (and works all the angles, including all the right camera angles) to make sure he actually achieves Greatness, to the point of occasionally coming off as slightly insufferable.
This is, admittedly partly grounded in my suspicion that ‘Garth of Izar’ might be a name in the spirit of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (I.E. a name associated with some past adventure, rather than his point of origin), suggesting someone with all the charisma, accomplishment and something of the presumptuousness seen in the Great Explorers of the Victorian era.
Is there a chance that Arik and Noonien Soong are actually the same person? The reference to the Briar Patch seems so conspicuous. Maybe Arik achieved great longevity on the Ba’ku planet and then later passed himself off as his own descendant. The closing line about cybernetics plays as more than just a gag if you read it that way.
Except we saw images of Noonien from when he was a very young man in “Birthright I” and again from when he was middle-aged in “Inheritance.” In both cases, they were holograms based on what Noonien looked like when he made them — the former in Data, the latter in the android version of Juliana Tainer — and both of them are younger than Arik presented as being in these episodes.
Also, that’s a big stretch anyhow. Why not just take it at face value?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Question for KRAD: I know that the Warp Factor rating is the least important part but I am curious – would your rating for the entire three-parter be higher or lower than this? It occurs to me that in this last season, a grade for the arcs as a whole couldbe much different from that of the episodes thereof – or even than the average of the ratings. Or maybe I am overthinking things …
twels: I haven’t done that for any other multipart Trek story, I see no reason to start now.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This isn’t entirely relevant to this thread, but it is an amusingly coincidental enough that I wanted to share it anyway: Mr Alec Newman, the Man who would be Khan in this story arc, has actually played Victor Frankenstein in an adaptation (Apparently a rather solid adaptation) of Mrs Shelley’s most famous work.
Amusingly, this was released in exactly the same year he showed up on the other side of the Monster/Creator dynamic!
@3/CLB: Another thing that bothers me about people getting ejected into space in Star Trek is that, with only a handful of exceptions (including with Archer in this episode), it’s treated by the story as instant death for the character.
It is, of course, survivable for half a minute or so, or even longer if the character gets prompt medical attention. In most of the cases where it has happened, the crew is aware immediately and could beam the person back into the ship. For that matter, it would be easy to build a sensor into a com badge (or other personal device, before the era of com badges)that could detect when the crewman has “gone overboard” and signals an emergency transport.