“The Crossing”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga & André Bormanis
Directed by David Livingston
Season 2, Episode 18
Production episode 044
Original air date: April 2, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise is tootling along when suddenly a ship—which is traveling faster than light but doesn’t appear to have any kind of warp propulsion—comes up behind them and basically swallows them up. As soon as they’re inside the vessel, engines and tactical systems shut down, though life support is still working.
Archer, Tucker, and Reed take a shuttlepod—which, for some reason, is still working even though the mothership’s propulsion is completely down—into the interior. The inimical atmosphere inside the ship changes to an oxygen-nitrogen one, though the crew sensibly leaves their EVA suits on.
Some non-corporeal beings—whom Archer will later dub “wisps,” so that’s what we’ll call them—zip around the interior. Scanners don’t register them, but one gold one goes inside Tucker’s head, and then a blue wisp exits his head. A few minutes later, the blue and gold switch again. Tucker claims to have been in Florida when he was out of his body.
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They return to Enterprise, but Phlox clears him medically. Later, while he’s trying to get the engines restarted, there’s another gold-wisp/blue-wisp switchout. Tucker is now obviously not himself and he wanders out of engineering, having a surreal conversation with Rostov and then going to the mess hall. Archer and T’Pol confront him there, where we find out that the wisps are able to temporarily switch places with corporeal beings. Tucker is being cared for by the other wisps, apparently, and the wisp is very much enjoying all the differences about being corporeal: eating, walking, having a gender, needing maintenance on your form, etc. Archer is suspicious, but the wisp insists that they’re explorers just like him.
As a gesture of good faith, the wisps let Enterprise back out into space and restore Tucker. The latter has nothing but good things to say about his experiences—which ranged from reliving memories to enjoying the odd wishful fantasy, like riding with Hopalong Cassidy.
The engines and tactical systems are still down, unfortunately, so once Phlox (again) clears Tucker, Archer puts the engineer on getting the ship up and running, while Reed is assigned to get weapons and shields back up. However, Reed encounters a wisp and is possessed by it (after trying to shoot it, of course). He immediately starts hitting on a female crewperson, making all kinds of oogy remarks about the differences between the male and female form that will totally get him written up by HR for sexual harassment, then, when she abandons the elevator with all due dispatch, wisp-Reed goes to T’Pol’s quarters to try to get in her pants. Once T’Pol figures out what’s going on—after initially thinking Reed is drunk—she contacts Archer who sends a security detail to confine wisp-Reed to his quarters.
Phlox reports that a wisp tried to possess him, but couldn’t. Meanwhile, several crewmembers start becoming possessed by wisps. T’Pol and Phlox devise a way to detect those who are possessed and confine them to quarters.
At one point, Mayweather is running away from a wisp when he heads toward the nacelles. Apparently the nacelles’ shielding is proof against the wisps, so Archer orders all non-wispy personnel to the catwalk. (Good thing the engines are already not working, huh?) T’Pol volunteers to put herself in the line of fire, as it were, as she believes Vulcan mental discipline can keep the wisps out. Archer reluctantly agrees, and T’Pol is possessed—however the wisp isn’t able to affect T’Pol the way they do the humans, and eventually they abandon her. T’Pol meanwhile has learned the truth: the wisps are looking for corporeal beings to possess so they can abandon their falling-apart ship. They can’t survive in space for reasons that the script doesn’t bother to explain (they’re non-corporeal and don’t breathe, so what’s the problem?).
Archer and T’Pol hatch a plan to flood the ship with carbon dioxide. Phlox executes this plan, since he’s the only one who can traverse the ship safely. Unfortunately, Tucker has been possessed again, and he overhears the plan and tries to stop Phlox. Luckily, he fails, and the possessed crew suffocates. The wisps leave their dying bodies, and then Phlox restores the atmosphere to something livable, and everyone miraculously survives. The wisp ship tries to overtake Enterprise again, but Reed has gotten the torpedoes working, and they blast the ship to smithereens.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently the wisps live in subspace. This might explain why they can move faster than light without a warp drive, though the episode itself doesn’t bother to explain it…
The gazelle speech. Archer doesn’t trust the wisps from the outset, and his instincts prove right.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol is willing to give the wisps the benefit of the doubt, but she’s also the one who determines their true colors due to the power of her awesome Vulcan brain meats.
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Optimism, Captain! Because Denobulans are apparently immune to being possessed by the wisps, it’s left to total non-techie Phlox to implement the flood-the-ship-with-CO2 plan. It goes, um, slowly.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. The wisp who possesses Reed is apparently sex-obsessed, as it tries to sleep with one crewperson and T’Pol (at least) in the most ham-handed manner possible.
More on this later… Star Trek has a loooooong history of encountering non-corporeal beings, but this is humanity’s first time encountering such, apparently.
I’ve got faith…
“We have no reason to believe their motives are hostile.”
“They’re holding my ship hostage.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We don’t? Look out there—you see any stars? Our engines are offline, our weapons—seems kind of hostile to me.”
–T’Pol and Archer arguing about the wisps’ intentions.
Welcome aboard. The only guest is recurring regular Joseph Will, back from “Two Days and Two Nights” as Rostov, in his final appearance (though he will be mentioned again).
Trivial matters: The crew once again takes refuge in the nacelle’s catwalk, just like they did in “The Catwalk,” and the improvised command center from that episode is still intact.
This episode was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Visual Effects for a Series, alongside two other Enterprise episodes, “Dead Stop” and “The Expanse.” They all lost to the pilot episode of Firefly.
It’s been a long road… “Non-corporeal life—that’s a first for Starfleet.” This episodes starts out so promising and then goes so totally in the toilet.
Seriously, I was loving this through to the end of the first act (though both the teaser and Act 1 end limply, continuing Enterprise’s tiresome tradition of not giving viewers any good reason to care about act breaks and encouraging them to change the channel to something more interesting while the commercial’s running). The conversation between wisp-Tucker and Archer is really compelling stuff. I loved the idea of non-corporeal life forms trading places with the humans on board so they could compare notes on how the other half lives. It’s a perfect Star Trek plot.
And then it goes straight into the shitter as soon as Reed starts macking on the female crew. We go from one wisp being fascinated by the concept of gender, and then go straight from that to “tell me of this human thing you call ‘sex’,” and it’s just so lazy and uninteresting and predictable.
On top of that, they don’t actually have enough story for an hour, so we get to spend an inordinate amount of time with Archer instructing Phlox on how to open a hatch and how to spray CO2 around the ship, not to mention a very lengthy digression with wisp-Sato telling Phlox that Sato broke her leg, and can he come fix it? Except she’s faking to get him in there so she can escape being confined. Linda Park delivers her dialogue particularly well there, actually, just sort of calmly talking about broken limbs, but the scene just goes on forever.
Then it ends with the Enterprise crew murdering the wisps. That may seem like an extreme statement, and yes, what the wisps did was pretty horrible, but it’s not a capital offense. The casualness of the brutality of Archer’s response is the issue here, more than the response itself. At the very least, there needed to be some agonizing about the actions they took here, but no, they just hare off and blow them up without a second thought. It’s awful.
The only saving grace of the disaster this episode turns into is the acting. Park, Dominick Keating, and especially Connor Trinneer do a wonderful job of doing the wisp versions of their characters, each taking on a rather calm, ethereal affect that’s very effective.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido has written a ton of short stories this year. They’ve appeared in The Fans are Buried Tales edited by Peter David & Kathleen O. David, Three Time Travelers Walk Into… edited by Michael A. Ventrella, Zorro’s Exploits edited by Audrey Parente, Phenomenons: Every Human Creature edited by Michael Jan Friedman, Tales of Capes and Cowls edited by C.T. Phipps, and Ludlow Charlington’s Doghouse edited by Tina Jens. He has at least two more due out before the end of the year, in Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2022 edited by Robert Greenberger and The Eye of Argon and the Further Adventures of Grignr the Barbarian edited by Ventrella, with a bunch more set for 2023 as well…
@krad, you won’t get even a particle of disagreement from me on this one – for my money, you’d have had to SHOW what was going on in Sub-Commander T’Pol’s head (giving us more of an insight into what the Wisps are like when they don’t have the subject completely in their power) and put Captain Archer in a more desperate state before he pulls the trigger for this episode to be all that it wants to be (So far as I can tell, the Best version of itself would be a study in the tragedies that can ensue when two crews of explorers meet and one just won’t stop pushing the boundaries).
This would, admittedly, require that the episode end on a note of regret and a keen desire to do better, which seems to be rather darker than ENTERPRISE prefers to go.
I found the turbolift scene considerably more awkward than the one with T’Pol. But I think your criticism is excessive. First we get one of the victims go mad about food, and making a pig of himself. Then we get one of the victims go mad about sex, and talk about it bluntly. Regarding that quip about HR, I wonder of the captain and medical officer have some forms to fill after the episode, “from this date to that date, the crew was under alien influences and not responsible for their actions …”
Comparing the Sato and T’Pol scenes, I found it a bit of a pity that T’Pol got to be “rescued” by the security team, after all her calm assurances that she could look after herself. This would have been a good moment to use a Vulcan nerve pinch, or the Vulcan strength she should have. Instead it is Sato who gets into a violent scuffle, who did it under the influence of an alien lifeform. So they have got an excuse to forget all about it by the next episode.
I’d forgotten Enterprise just blows up the aliens at the end of this. No regrets, no attempt to negotiate a truce, just fire torpedoes. And it really did start off promising.
I did like the performances, particularly wisp-Hoshi. Linda Park gets so very little to do, and her affect was particularly creepy. Speaking of creepy, wisp-Reed is super gross, and Dominic Keating sells it. Kudos to Connor Trinneer for make wisp-Tucker compelling; too bad they just get blown up in the end.
I entirely agree that the ending was basically murder. I know that they’re trying to show a less-enlightened humanity on Enterprise but I remember quite specifically thinking “I miss TNG” after watching this one.
I was also a bit grossed out that they way that they showed that the wisp in Reed’s body was an irredeemable pervert was by having him talk about experiencing different genders.
If an alien being were trying to possess my body, hijack my ship, and maroon my consciousness on an unsurvivable ship, I’d feel pretty justified in responding with deadly force. Maybe the Trekkiest ending would have been to negotiate and help them out–and perhaps the script should have gone there–but the crew were definitely under deadly attack and responded in kind. Pretty in character for 22nd-century humans.
Daniel Friend: I don’t agree that that was justification for deadly force, but then my standards for such are extremely high. So, usually, is Star Trek‘s, which is why I a) like the franchise so much and b) don’t like this episode very much.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad: That is a reasonable place to disagree. Love your rewatches! I look forward to them every week. :)
“The Crossing” is another forgettable episode — and another entry in the show’s perennially bad and tasteless handling of sexuality in general and T’Pol’s in particular, with Malcolm’s possession going the way it does.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of incorporeal life forms not being able to survive in space. Incorporeal beings probably come in various different types with different capabilities and needs, just as corporeal beings do. Perhaps the Wisps need some kind of finite environment or specific conditions to keep from dissipating. Maybe on their planet, their life functions depended on its magnetic field, and they need a ship to generate the kind of field they need. Maybe exposure to the raw radiation of space (which is hella intense, something that sci-fi tends to gloss over) would disrupt their energies, so they need a ship’s hull to shield them as much as humanoids do. Or maybe the Wisps are like the disembodied minds in TOS: “Return to Tomorrow” — they can only survive within some kind of physical containment, either a living brain or a receptacle of some kind. The Wisp shisp — err, ship — could be a large, mobile equivalent of Sargon’s receptacle or a Vulcan katric ark.
This is the first time Humanity has encountered a non corporeal life form but by the time of TOS they seem to be fairly common. Some apparently have the means to operate spacecraft on their own (the Thasians) while others need intermediaries (Redjack, Sargon etc). In this case, as the aliens seem to exist fine in Space, it’s possible that all Archer did by blowing up the alien ship, was to limit their ability to take over other vessels.
Yeah, I’m with you, KRAD….this episode is just terrible.
I binge-watched all of Enterprise during the pandemic and I have absolutely zero memory of this episode.
Now I am wondering if we’ll ever see an HR officer on a Trek show. Maybe on “Lower Decks” …
@12/jmeltzer: “Now I am wondering if we’ll ever see an HR officer on a Trek show.”
Managing personnel within an organization? That’s actually pretty much a first officer’s job.
This was far from my favorite episode, and it is clear I am far from alone.
@13 – Managing personnel doesn’t negate the need for a dedicated HR division, even just for administrative purposes, but also to set policy and resolve disagreements when the manager and employee disagree. Granted with main character syndrome we never see such people, and this Enterprise isn’t so large as to need a whole department dedicated to HR issues, but it is something that realistically should be around in some form or another.
Otherwise, like bgsu98above, I had completely forgotten about this episode despite rewatching the whole series not that long ago. I would have thought the ending, which I also found rather callous, might have left some impression, but apparently not. I basically have to agree there was a lot of wasted potential with this one.
“T’Pol thinks they just want to get to know us. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I don’t trust them because they’re so different. I’d hate to think that was the case.”
When I got the show on DVD, I had no memory of this episode whatsoever. I know I saw it on Channel 4 but none of it managed to lodge anywhere. I remembered a bit more from that second viewing, mainly that the plot didn’t make much sense, but watching it again I was surprised by how little of it I remembered. And now I kind of want to forget it again as quickly as possible.
The first five minutes are great. Unlike krad, I felt Enterprise being swallowed up by the giant spaceship is one of the best pre-credits we’ve had to date and Archer, Tucker and Reed’s exploration is genuinely suspenseful. The next ten minutes aren’t bad. There’s still the possibility that the wisps are merely oblivious to the harm they might be doing and that this could result in a peaceful first contact between two very different races, with Archer forced to ask some difficult questions about how much of a limit he wants to place on what he’s willing to explore.
And then we get the rest of the episode and…ho, boy.
The wisps, having done a good impersonation of benevolence up until now, decide to stop pretending to be good guys and start being creepy out of nowhere. (And it’s rather worrying how long it takes people to realise that Reed is possessed and not just being sleazy!) We then get a lengthy sequence of the wisps possessing a few people here and a few people there and I’m not quite sure why they’re doing it like that. If the idea is to take over the whole of Enterprise’s crew (except Phlox and maybe T’Pol), then I can understand them needing to test they can control humans at first, but once they’ve established that works, why not just flood Enterprise en masse? And why does Archer go the whole episode unmolested and thus able to work out a plan to get rid of them, rather than the wisps deciding to rob Enterprise of its leadership?
Then the episode pretty much runs out of ideas, so we get a remake of ‘The Catwalk’ shoe-horned in, the ultimately pointless sequence of Wisp-Sato trying to escape, and the fact that the bad guys are the bad guys being treated like a surprise reveal: Okay, we get the added information that the wisps plan to leave the crew’s consciousness in their collapsing ship to die, but T’Pol’s “They lied!” still deserves a “Well, yeah, where have you been?”
And then they come up with a “We need to kill the crew to save them” plan. But they need some added jeopardy, so out of nowhere it turns out Tucker’s possessed again so he can provide a fist fight for the climax. Archer blows the bad aliens up (although I’d classify it as self-defence rather than “murder” given that the wisps a)want to kill all the crew or at least leave them to die and b)have shown the ability to shut Enterprise down completely if they get close enough…is this any different to the end of “Fight or Flee”?) and then the episode just…stops with Tucker and Phlox ambling down the corridor having apparently forgotten that a third of the crew, including Reed and Sato, are clinically dead. (Or are we to assume they all spontaneously started breathing again once the carbon dioxide was turned off?)
Honestly, anyone who claims that ‘A Night in Sickbay’ is the Worst Episode Ever must have just forgotten that this exists.
This episode could have been an interesting example of differing societal boundaries. What if the wisps just didn’t respects the crews boundaries in their explorations?
How do you deal with a first contact where the other race does not respect your basic bodily autonomy but isn’t trying to do you any harm? Could have been an interesting scenario instead of turning it into a simple “bad aliens” story.
Definitely started out good and the premise was interesting. Not every seemingly good alien needs to turn out to be actually good, but the execution here is botched. Killing an entire ship of alien life forms with no remorse seems very antithetical to Star Trek.
Using carbon dioxide is a horrible way to render everyone unconscious or near death, because it triggers the hypercapnic alert response and the person struggles to survive (often violently). It’s the reason sleep apnea is not deadly: the body reacts.
Proper thing would be something to replace oxygen without triggering that reflex; nitrogen or helium are both possible.
I know ENT tries to bring back the concept that space is both dangerous and unknown, which harkens back to the original show. It’s also an approach that fits Brannon Braga’s horror sensibilities (especially with David Livingston behind the camera, of all people).
And yet, they really dropped the ball here. A promising first act with some top notch VFX and ideas that quickly devolves into a generic possession story. And the less said about the Reed hybrid the better.
And the way they handled the whole wisp situation at the end. I almost get xenophobic vibes from this episode. It reminds me a bit of VOY‘s Displaced, and the way that episode tried doing an immigration allegory only to end up justifying fear mongering by making the immigrants dangerous.
This episode reminded me somewhat of a Doctor Who episode that aired a couple of years later, The Unquiet Dead.
Both had a rather… unpleasant end in store for the aliens, but at least the Doctor Who episode tried to ask questions I would have liked to see here – specifically “is it moral to use corpses as temporary housing for aliens in need”.
Archer’s immediately confrontational exchange with Wisp!Tucker was the turning point of the episode for me. Where was the wonder? The joy at meeting a new species? The thrill of exploration? Nobody seemed to display any level of curiosity, and that, too, was something an exploration ship on a mission of First Contact should have been much more into.
My memory of this episode is sufficiently faded that I thought this was the Organians episode. And was surprised reading the ending. In my Trek brain I read, they’re trying to take over the Enterprise because their ship is damaged, as a cue that, Oh the Enterprise crew is going to help them repair their ship. I’m not appalled that they destroyed the ship as much as surprised and confused.
@22: Exactly. It bugs me that, after T’Pol learns of the ship’s condition, nobody even considers offering to help repair the ship or relocate the wisps. Enterprise has plenty of skilled corporeal hands, and the hundreds of wisps in excess of Enterprise‘s complement have nothing to lose from the attempt. It seems as good a place as any to begin negotiations.
This screenplay needed at least one more draft; the wisps and “how they work” were half-baked. It was never explained how they control their ship without physical bodies. Through something like telepathy, I’d guess, but we’re never told.
Also, the catwalk was safe from the aliens—but they had to open the hatch to get into the catwalk, and it had to have been opened many times to get two-thirds of the crew into the space. Why weren’t the wisps massing outside the hatch and just picking them off as they arrived?
And the wisps “couldn’t survive in space,” but Enterprise was in open space, outside the wisps’ ship, the first time the wisp left Tucker and Tucker’s “soul” (for want of a better word) returned. Why wasn’t that fatal to the wisp or Tucker or both? Maybe the wisps can survive short exposures, but we’re never told that.
I am also bothered by the ending. Not only because they kill hundreds of beings but because they decide to do that off-screen, with no debate or search for alternatives, and don’t seem to feel particularly bad about it afterwards. I agree that it would have been a much more interesting episode if the non-corporeal beings really were explorers who treated the crew a bit like lab rats, not as equal beings with the right to consent or not. What if they really intended to return everyone to their bodies and let them go, but first wanted to experience corporeal life without much care for the crew’s feelings on the matter?
My other huge problem with this episode is what is says about the experiences of women in Starfleet. When Reed starts acting entirely inappropriately, first ogling one woman in the corridor and then harassing one in the turbolift, neither raise any alarm. Then T’Pol initially thinks that Reed is drunk. That means that either these women don’t find the behavior to be so unusual as to merit an immediate report (extremely concerning/disappointing for what that says about the future), or they are all being idiots by failing to flag the likelihood that he is possessed given that they know that there are non-corporeal beings around who are interested in, and capable of, possessing crewmembers.
It doesn’t speak highly of Reed that, after serving with him for more than a year, T’Pol thinks drunk before possessed.
i just fast-forwarded through the episode, because it was indeed mostly just boring / annoying, which is a big achievement out of a promising start. I personally would not mind that they destroyed the ship in self-defense, but they really did not try too much to talk / negotiate or find another way to rescue the beings or something and it was really unclear for me, why they couldn’t just ask for a ride for all non-corporeal beings on the Enterprise without taking over the crews’ bodies.
And the other thing – it’s really worrying if the captain of a ship of exploration is absolutely not curious to get to know a completely different species and civilisation.