“United”
Written by Manny Coto and Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens
Directed by David Livingston
Season 4, Episode 13
Production episode 089
Original air date: February 4, 2005
Date: November 15, 2154
Captain’s star log. After getting a summary of “Babel One,” we see Tucker and Reed being bounced around the drone ship. However, they are now approaching their next target, so Valdore orders the bouncy maneuvers to cease, and for the holographic skin to be that of Enterprise. Thus disguised, it ambushes a Rigellian ship, destroying it, but making sure they have time to send a distress call first.
On Enterprise, Archer learns of the attack on the Rigellian ship and that the Rigellians are calling for his arrest. T’Pol and Mayweather tell him that they’ve come up with a way to detect the drone ship with a sensor grid, but it would require 128 ships.
Shran tries to cheer Talas up in sickbay. While the shot that she was hit with was just a graze, it was with a phase pistol set to kill. Talas doesn’t buy Shran’s reassurances that she’ll be all right and begs him to avenge her.
Archer approaches Shran about a plan to use Starfleet, Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellarite ships to find the drone. Before he can even get the plan out of his mouth, Shran says that he’s fine with any plan Archer has as long as it allows him to kill Tellarites. This puts a damper on Archer’s optimism.
On Romulus, Senator Vrax shows up with two Reman commandos and expressing displeasure with the drone ship being adrift following its destruction of the Rigellian ship. Valdore assures him that the auto-repair system is working just fine and the drone will be underway soon. The senator tells Valdore that they cannot allow the drone to fall into Vulcan hands, as they’ll recognize the propulsion system as being Romulan in design. Valdore says there’s nothing to worry about, but Vrax makes it clear that he’ll declare the mission a success to the rest of the senate, but only if he brings the drone home as soon as it’s repaired.
Starfleet is sending some ships, but they’ll take a while to get there. The only ship that’s as fast as Enterprise—the NX-02, Columbia—is still in drydock with engine trouble. Vulcan can only spare twenty-three ships, as they’re in turmoil following High Command’s disbanding. They have to get the Andorians and Tellarites on board to make this work. Since humans are the only people that all three species get along with, Archer thinks they can coordinate this. If not, the Romulans will view this as a success and come back in greater numbers.
Tucker is able to finally find a life support system and get it running, so they can take off their helmets. They figure the ship is automated, so they try to figure out ways to stop it. Eventually, they’re able to take the warp drive offline, which brings the ship to a stop. Tucker goes to a service junction where there are more controls and starts messing with the ship some more.
On Romulus, Nijil reports that one of the humans has moved to the service junction and is sabotaging the warp drive. It’ll take the auto-repair more time to fix it than Vrax has given them. On Valdore’s order, Tucker is sealed inside the service junction, which Nijil floods with coolant. Tucker—who stupidly left his helmet on the bridge—starts to cough and collapse from the radiation.
Archer convinces Shran and Gral to put aside their differences, because if they don’t, the Romulans get exactly what they want. They agree, and provide communication codes to each other so they can coordinate the search grid. When Shran provides the codes to Archer, the pair of them discuss the illustrations on Archer’s ready-room wall, which are all previous vessels with the name Enterprise. Shran says that the Kumari was named for the first ice-cutter to circumnavigate Andoria. They speculate that future ships might be named Enterprise and Kumari if they accomplish great things together, and they shake hands.
Reed tries to save Tucker, to no avail. Finally, against Tucker’s orders, Reed restores the warp drive. Valdore then opens the door to the service junction—but as soon as Reed enters (with the helmet to Tucker’s EVA suit), Valdore seals them both in. Reed then recommends that they move very far from the bridge, though he doesn’t explicitly say why, as Valdore is likely still listening. Reed left a phase pistol on overload in a console on the bridge. They open an access hatch port and start moving.
Phlox informs Shran that Talas has died. The doctor tried everything, but was unable to save her. Shran interrupts a meeting between Archer and Gral to challenge Gral’s aide to a duel of honor. As Sato later informs Archer, the Ushaan is a fight to the death with ushaan-tors, ice-cutting blades that Andorians play with as children. Gral’s aide wouldn’t last five seconds—not that Gral is even allowing him to participate. This means the Andorians won’t stay with the sensor grid.
However, Sato finds a loophole: there is a right of substitution. Archer will fight in the aide’s place. Shran doesn’t wish to fight Archer, but he has already lost his love and his ship—if he doesn’t avenge Talas’ death, he will lose face in the eyes of his surviving crew.
Sato and Mayweather pore over the (lengthy) literature on the Ushaan, looking for ways for Archer to survive this. T’Pol tries to talk Archer out of it, but the captain explains that he’s the only expendable person: if Shran or Gral’s aide are killed, it’ll just raise tensions and kill the alliance. If Archer is killed, it’s no big deal—T’Pol can take over as captain, the Andorians and Tellarites will both be happy, and they can get back to fighting the Romulans.
Buy the Book
System Collapse
The fight begins—the combatants have ushaan-tors in one hand and gauntlets that can serve as shields in the other. The gauntlets are linked by a long chain that tethers the fighters to each other. Shran mostly has the upper hand—with Archer boasting that he’s just letting Shran do better to look good to his soldiers—and then Archer manages to wrap the chain around Shran’s neck.
Then he cuts off one of Shran’s antennae. This actually fulfills the criteria for the Ushaan, as it ends when a combatant can no longer defend themselves. The loss of balance that comes with losing an antenna qualifies. Honor is fulfilled, nobody died, and they can get on with the mission.
The sensor grid finds the drone ship, and Enterprise heads there. They arrive to find what appears to be a Vulcan ship, but it has the same power signature as the drone ship. The two ships exchange fire, with Archer urging Tucker and Reed to move closer to the hull so they can beam them out. That doesn’t work—the ship is moving around too much for T’Pol to get a lock.
On Romulus, Nijil is just waiting for the warp drive to finish auto-repairing.
Tucker and Reed blow a hatch and are floating freely in space, but now Enterprise has sustained sufficient damage that they still can’t get a transporter lock.
The Romulan ship warps away. Enterprise is able to rescue Tucker and Reed now, but the drone ship is gone. When they’re changing out of their EVA suits, Tucker reluctantly says that he has to put Reed on report for disobeying orders. This outrages Reed, who did save their lives. Tucker strings him along for several seconds before making it clear that he’s joking. Reed is not amused…
Once the drone ship is safely inside the Romulan border, they disconnect the remote pilot from the controls. When they remove the helmet we see what looks like an Andorian, albeit a blind albino one…
To be continued…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Mayweather comes up with a fancy-shmancy sensor grid to find the drone ship.
Also, the drone ship doesn’t have inertial dampeners working in order to bounce Tucker and Reed around the ship. This should pulverize them against the hull…
The gazelle speech. Archer shows impressive political acumen and capacity for self-sacrifice by recognizing that his dying is virtually the only way for the Ushaan to play out in such a way that preserves the very fragile alliance that is barely holding together as it is…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol is not sanguine about Archer’s prospects in the fight, and feels that losing him is too big a price to pay.
Florida Man. Florida Man Repays Armory Officer For Saving His Life By Playing Practical Joke.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox tries to do everything he can to save Talas, but is unsuccessful. He also has advice for Archer on how to survive the fight.
Blue meanies. Apparently Andoria is covered in ice (we’ll see more of that next week). The ushaan-tor is an ice-cutting blade, and the Andorians have sea-faring vessels that are referred to as ice-cutters. Also we meet our first Aenar in the person of the remote pilot, though we don’t know he’s an Aenar, yet.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Shran tells Talas that Phlox has a crush on her, by way of explaining why she’s still in sickbay even though he said her wounds were superficial. Her loss devastates him.
More on this later… T’Pol says that a Vulcan saying is “One man can summon the future.” In the original series’ “Mirror, Mirror,” the alternate Spock said, “One man cannot summon the future.”
Also, Archer’s conversations with Shran (about future ships named after their vessels) and T’Pol (about humans’ ability to bring people together) presage the Federation that is to come. And Archer mentions the possibility of thousands of Romulan ships attacking, which presages the Earth-Romulan War that we’ve known is imminent since the original series’ “Balance of Terror.”
I’ve got faith…
“You should’ve cut off my head.”
“I considered it, but I still need your help.”
–Shran and Archer after fighting to the not-death.
Welcome aboard. Back from “Babel One” are Jeffrey Combs as Shran, Brian Thompson as Valdore, Lee Arenberg as Gral, J. Michael Flynn as Nijil, and Molly Brink as Talas. We’ve also got Geno Silva as Vrax. Combs, Thompson, Flynn, and Silva will be back next time in “The Aenar.”
Trivial matters: The is the second part of Enterprise’s final three-parter, continuing from “Babel One,” and concluding in “The Aenar.”
The Columbia was first referenced in “The Expanse” and was established as still being in drydock in “Home.” It’ll finally be launched in “Affliction.”
T’Pol mentions that T’Pau is now in a position of authority on Vulcan, as was implied by the ending of “Kir’Shara,” which is also when High Command was disbanded.
This is chronologically the first cooperative endeavor among the four founding species of the Federation: humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites.
This is only the second appearance of Remans since their introduction in Nemesis.
This is the last of sixty-two episodes of Trek directed by longtime producer David Livingston, whose first-ever directing credit was TNG’s “The Mind’s Eye” in 1991. It’s also his final screen directing credit, and indeed, his only IMDB credit that is more recent than working on Enterprise is two episodes as a producer on Threshold (which Enterprise co-creator Brannon Braga was show-runner for).
“United” was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup for a Series, Miniseries, Movie, or Special. It lost to HBO’s The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.
It’s been a long road… “You’re good at building things, I’m good at blowing them up.” I really need there to be a moratorium on fights to the death in which neither of the combatants actually dies. One of the reasons why TNG’s “Reunion” was effective was because Worf really did kill Duras. But most of the time on television, including on the various Treks, nominal fights to the death do not end with any fatalities (also true of far too many suicide missions, which is also why the ending of TNG’s “Lower Decks” was so powerful).
It’s too bad, because having Yet Another Tiresome Fight To The Death (one which doesn’t even have cool fight music like the iconic score the original series gave the Spock-Kirk fight in “Amok Time”) is the only real blot on this powerful episode. It’s especially nice having scripters like Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens who understand how pacing works, as we not only have a teaser that genuinely teases—with the drone ship taking on Enterprise’s image to blow up an innocent Rigellian ship—but we also have Archer slicing downward toward Shran’s head before going to an act break, a genuine bit of suspense. Not that we were really expecting Archer to behead Shran, but hey, Shran is a guest star, not an opening-credits regular, so you never know…
It’s obvious the Ushaan was put in the script to up the action quotient, and I must confess to liking the tethered-fighters aspect of the Ushaan, an aspect of the setup that Archer does a good job of exploiting for his own gain. But the episode doesn’t actually need it. The back-and-forth of sabotage and threats between the Romulans and the Enterprise away team on the drone ship is very compelling, as is watching Archer try to hold the nascent alliance together with both hands. I particularly like that Archer doesn’t try to break up the fight between Shran and Gral after they trade insults, preferring instead to talk to them and remind them that they’re acting like idiots—more to the point, exactly the type of idiots that services the Romulans’ cause.
I also really like that the Romulans only don’t succeed to the degree they’d hoped because of human ingenuity and compassion. Last week, their deception is uncovered really only because Enterprise diverted to respond to Shran’s distress call. This week, the Romulans are confident that they won’t be discovered as long as the Vulcans don’t capture the drone ship—but the joke’s on them, because Enterprise figured out it was them in “Babel One.” And, more directly, Tucker and Reed do a wonderful job of being sand in the machinery of the Romulan ship.
Plus we get the first true murmurings of a United Federation of Planets, with ships from Earth, Vulcan, Andoria, and Tellar Prime all uniting (ahem) in the common goal of stopping the Romulans. Which is especially heartening, since the entire objective of the drone ship was to sow discontent and division….
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest work is The Four ???? of the Apocalypse, co-edited by him and Wrenn Simms, on sale today from WhysperWude. It features alternate takes on the end-of-the-world quartet, such as the four PTA Moms of the apocalypse, the four cats of the apocalypse, the four Hollywood executives of the apocalypse, the four lawyers of the apocalypse, and so on. Among the contributors are Star Trek scribes David Gerrold, David Mack, Peter David, Derek Tyler Attico, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, and Aaron Rosenberg, as well as New York Times best-sellers Seanan McGuire, Jonathan Maberry, and Jody Lynn Nye, and tons more.
“These four species have never co-operated on a mutual endeavour.”
Well, here’s a novelty: The middle episode of an Enterprise three-parter that’s actually good! It helps that it’s actually got a story to tell rather than just delaying the conclusion for 40 minutes. The situation with Tucker and Reed trapped on the Romulan drone ship is resolved, and we get to follow through the storyline of Archer trying to bring all the affected species together against their common enemy in a mini-Federation…which, ironically, means the Romulans have achieved exactly the opposite of what they were aiming for. The inclusion of Remans is a nice bit of retroactive continuity, even if it is probably down to having more spare costumes left over from Nemesis.
Archer is seriously badass here, holding everyone together by sheer force of personality, sitting back and letting Shran and Gral argue it out when necessary, and fighting a duel: The moment when he gives Shran that look and both Shran and the audience realise before he says it that he’s going to be standing in for Naargh (as Gral’s aide was named in last episode’s credits) had me smiling in anticipation. And he doesn’t disappoint either, despite taking a lot of physical punishment as he is wont to do.
And we get good work for the other characters as well. T’Pol once again shows how much she doesn’t want Archer to die (as he seems to be prepared to do) with just the tiniest chink in her Vulcan stoicism. Reed gets a good moment when we realise he’s won the double/triple-cross with the Romulans by leaving a booby-trap behind on the bridge. I realised early on that, with Tucker and Reed off ship, Mayweather and Sato are now senior command staff. It doesn’t give them as much screen time as I’d hoped, but there little subplot of studying the rules of the combat is more than they’d get in most episodes. Having Gral in Archer’s corner at the duel is a nice touch.
So, everything’s sorted apart from the drone ship still being active, until we get another final twist at the end, with the mysterious hooded pilot turning out to be an Andorian rather than a Romulan. I had no idea that was coming on first viewing, so see what they do with it next episode.
There are a few things in this trilogy–the unneccessary Ushaan duel and the Aenar pilot–that feel like they were added only to do some last-minute worldbuilding for the Andorians. I don’t really mind it–I like the Andorians–though there has been little about their depiction before now that would have suggested that they came from an icy planet (and I rather preferred their treatment in Marvel’s Starfleet Academy comics from the 90s, where their homeworld was lush and jungular, if only because their bright colouration suggests a tropical biome to me).
Also, I really liked how they retconned the Remans into Romulan culture in this episode. I do wish that their costuming budgets were a bit bigger, as I believe that both the Romulans and the Remans are just wearing uniforms from Nemesis, but that’s such a minor criticism in hardly needs mentioning.
The worldbuilding for Andoria — the icy climate and the Ushaan-tor business — was based on Among the Clans, a 1999 supplement book for the Last Unicorn Trek RPG. I was disappointed that, if they were going to borrow worldbuilding from a book, they didn’t draw on the extensive Andorian worldbuilding done by the Pocket novels.
I suspect that they were trying to set up a fire/ice contrast between the Vulcans and Andorians, what with Vulcan being a hot, arid world, but it doesn’t really work for me. Now if they had said that Tellar was an ice planet, I would have bought that. Tellarites, to me, have the build of creatures that evolved to retain their body heat.
I’m generally not a fan of single-climate planets in fiction, but an ice planet is one of the more credible possibilities, given that “Snowball Earth” is believed to have happened several times in the Precambrian Era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth
See I’ve always figured that Vulcan and Andor(ia) aren’t really single-biome planets so much as they are planets that are, respectively, hotter/dryer and colder than Earth, such that they get interpreted by humans as ‘desert planet’ or ‘tundra planet’. One of the things that I liked on Discovery is that they actually showed a forest in their depiction of Vulcan.
@6/jaimebabb: Yeah, Vulcan is generally depicted as having a modest amount of ocean cover. I tend to assume Andoria isn’t 100% glaciated, just mostly so. But I’m just saying in general that if a planet were portrayed as having a single planetwide climate, a “Snowball” world would be more plausible than most.
Of course, Mars and Venus pretty much have single planetwide climates, or nearly so. It’s really only implausible on a planet with less extreme conditions where life could exist. Life arises from complexity and generates complexity, so an inhabited planet should probably have a range of different climates.
I’ll be talking more about the Andorian world building next week when they actually go to Andor(ia).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m glad you pointed out the fight to the death where no one dies!
There was a second thing about the fight that frustrated me about the fight as well: we’re told that Shran, as a member of the Imperial Guard, has been training for combat his whole life, but Archer is able to dispatch him in a style of combat he’d never heard of before in a couple of minutes. Similarly, in the trilogy on Vulcan, Archer was able to beat up the High Command’s thugs despite the fact that Vulcan’s are supposed to be stronger than humans and that climate should have further weakened Archer. It helps Archer shine as the action hero of each individual episode, but it’s not great for world-building.
Not that Enterprise is in any way alone in this. I seem to remember Kirk holding his own in a fight against Khan in Space Speed.
@9/wyatt: It’s possible that Archer had the advantage that he wasn’t trying to fight to the death, but instead planned to go for the antennae to incapacitate Shran, so he used tactics Shran didn’t expect.
The thing I hate about this episode is Talas’ death. It was about one step away from Phlox saying “I’m sorry but she died because of plot.” And the annoying thing is that they didn’t even need to invent “phase pistol poisoning” Have her be badly injured by a gut wound, Phlox operates and she seems to be recovered and then she suffers an aneurysm or something similar.
I also personally would have much rather had a duel to the death where Shran beats Archer and then refuses to finish him.
I know it barely begins to describe the frustrations with Enterprise as a whole, but:-
Why didn’t they start the show with this?
They spent one season doing boom-chick-a-bow-wow “decontamination” porn, then glacial eons passed with the Xindi/Temporal Cold War nonsense, and only then, once they finally put the bullet into that particular misadventure, do they produce an arc which deals with the entire premise of the show – How The Federation Came To Be.
And I know, the USA went a bit, well, out of its collective mind there for a few years, which apparently meant we had to have Afghanistan/Iraq In Space, but the entire series is just a litany of lost opportunity and dismal waste.
@12/dgold: The answer is that no show can succeed if it’s made exclusively for the existing fanbase of a franchise, because that’s far too small an audience to make the show profitable. Maybe appealing to fans alone can work to an extent on a paid subscription service like Paramount+, but on commercial TV, a show can only succeed if it’s accessible to new and casual viewers, if it can stand alone as its own entity rather than just being an extension of something else. Enterprise had to stand on its own as a series about space explorers, with the continuity element of setting up future series being a secondary priority.
Keep in mind that the most successful Trek sequel, TNG, went out of its way to avoid continuity ties to what had come before. It mostly added whole new elements to the universe and told its own stories, with revisits of TOS concepts or characters being rare exceptions. We’ve forgotten that in this age when most of the new shows (not just in Trek but in franchise media in general) are constantly referencing the past and trying to ride the coattails of their predecessors, when they should instead be taking the lead.
As I said, the reason ENT season 4 was so continuity-heavy was because everyone except the hardcore Trekkies had already abandoned the show. That narrow focus on what the hardcore fanbase wanted to see was a symptom of its failure.
Personally, I’m glad that Enterprise didn’t start with this, and I liked that it took a while to lay the groundwork in episodes like “The Andorian Incident” and “Ceasefire”. That said, I really think that they could have done more work building up to this, instead of…whatever they were doing earlier, particularly in the second season, when they seemed to be desperately scraping for enough ideas to fill 26 episodes. I made this point last week, but the Tellarites are extremely underdeveloped (and we’ve only ever seen them in one exceedingly mediocre episode prior to this arc); the Andorians are only being developed now; and even the Vulcans, so central to the series’ premise, were mostly just framed as hidebound obstructionists until a few episodes ago (notwithstanding anything that had been previously established about them on other series). It would have been very nice if we could have spent more of the first three seasons getting background on these cultures.
I’ll get more into this when I do the fourth-season overview early next year, but honestly I’m with dgold. This is the type of thing they should’ve been doing all along, especially given that it’s a prequel. Yes, TNG succeeded because it moved forward and wasn’t navel-gazing backward, but it also jumped the timeline 80 years. One of the reasons Discovery seasons 3ff have been so good is that same timeline-jumping.
jaimebabb is right — they shouldn’t have jumped right in with episodes like what we got in season four, but they should’ve spent season one on more episodes like “The Andorian Incident” and “Shadows of P’Jem” and “Cease Fire” and built to the point where they could’ve done episodes like what they did in season four in season two.
Christopher, I heartily disagree with everything you say in comment #13 because while season four is more continuity heavy, it’s also telling better stories. The problem with the first two seasons is that it was just a bland-ass show about bland-ass people faffing around space. Even with all the flaws, the stories being told in this season are way more compelling viewing than Mediocre White People Failing Upward, which was the theme of way too much of the first two years. The problem isn’t with the type of stories being told (in either direction) but the fact that most of the first three seasons was just not very good…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I figure I might throw this in here as well as anywhere.
But I felt that it was a missed opportunity to keep the Tellarites eye-holes. A species that sees through “Heat pits” would have been an interesting idea, and would have helped reinforce the rivalry between them and the Andorians. Andorians being all about ice after all. But I imagine it was cheaper to keep the actor’s eyes, and It probably would have looked weird to non-dedicated sci-fi fans. After all, you want your audience to connect with the cast, and the eyes are the “window to the soul” according to some.
I just felt that it was a missed opportunity to recreate them as something a little more…alien.
@14/jaime: I’ll agree with that. Season 1 made a good start, laying the groundwork patiently rather than wallowing in continuity like modern franchise shows tend to do, but then season 2 had no direction or momentum, and season 3 was a desperate attempt to do something big and flashy to grab for ratings. And season 4 was too heavily driven by continuity. It would’ve been better overall if there’d been a steadier buildup from season 2 to 4, a more consistent sense of forward progression, so that all the stuff crammed into S4 could’ve been moved through more gradually.
@15/krad: Oh, I definitely agree that the stories are better in season 4. But that’s about how they’re written, not what they’re focused on. It’s not the continuity porn that made the writing good, it’s the good writing that made the continuity porn palatable (in the way that Picard season 3 was definitely not).
I’m not saying the focus on continuity made the season bad. I’m saying that it was only allowed to happen because the network had already given up on trying to appeal to a more general audience, so it no longer discouraged the producers from embracing a more fannish, continuity-driven approach. It was fun and satisfying for us fans, but it would never have happened if the show wasn’t already doomed to cancellation. This is the case with a lot of shows — the quest for commercial success places strictures on a show to be “mainstream” or conform to certain formulas, so it’s often the case that the doomed shows the execs don’t care about anymore are the ones that are most free to be wildly creative and uninhibited.
@16/Cleggster – I didn’t even realise that there was a conceptual reason for the Tellarites’ sunken eyes; I just figured that that was the quality of the masks they were using on The Original Series.
@13/Christopher Bennett: The Andorian Incident and Shadows of P’Jem didn’t require continuity porn to work. Once you establish that Vulcans and Andorians don’t like each other, and there are these aliens called Romulans plotting in the shadows to ensure their neighbors remain weak and divided, you have enough of a set-up for casual viewers to follow along with.
The thing that always bothered me about Talas’ death is how easily Gral’s aide wrenched the phase pistol from her grip and shot her. She’s an experienced tactical officer in the Andorian Imperial Guard up against a diplomat’s aide, for goodness’ sake.
Travis finally getting some more things to do other than push buttons for once, hurray!
The bit between Reed and Trip at the end never ceases to get a chuckle from me. The stiff military man being made fun of in the way only his closest friend and superior can.
@9. wyatt-rubal “There was a second thing about the fight that frustrated me about the fight as well: we’re told that Shran, as a member of the Imperial Guard, has been training for combat his whole life, but Archer is able to dispatch him in a style of combat he’d never heard of before in a couple of minutes.”
Archer is consistently being dominated by Shran whenever it comes to fighting with the actual blade. The only times he has the upper hand over Shran, he’s fighting unconventionally and throwing Shran off. The fight also makes me think that Archer is taking Phlox’s advice to “keep moving and exhaust him” to heart with all the maneuvering Archer does. So while Shran easily wipes the floor with Archer in direct combat, human ingenuity and a duel that moved to tire Shran brings Archer the victory.
jaime – Exactly, much of Season 2 (and 3, even though I quite like it) could have and should have been about the building blocks of the Federation and the setup to the diplomatic and political situation we see in the 23rd century.
Thank God, Thank God, Thank God, I can finally post again.
Anyway, chalk me up as yet another who has been enjoying this sequence of episodes: I’m fairly certain this episode is a Gold Standard in how to make sure the middle part of a trilogy does NOT fall flat.
As all key points seem to have been covered, I just wanted to add that one can only imagine Malcolm Reed being DELIGHTED to get a chance to indulge his abiding love of Blowing **** Up; also that, whatever the faults of STAR TREK NEMESIS, the Remans really do add something wonderfully sinister to Romulan visuals (Especially when they just … show up, without explanation or undue stress being placed on their presence).
All in all, Season 4 strongly suggests a show that found it’s groove just in time to dance off into the sunset (This rewatch has just made me all the more grateful when newer, more universally-beloved shows like LOWER DECKS and STRANGE NEW WORLDS give little nods to NX-01 et al; who knows, at this point ENTERPRISE may someday get the Big Finale a STAR TREK deserves, rather than the limp conclusion I recall from previous experience with the series).
@3. ChristopherLBennett: One must admit that I really loved Last Unicorn’s PLANETS OF THE UFP – one would particularly love to see their very Steampunk vision of Tellarite Prime brought to life (Not least since I really love their characterisation of Tellarites as deeply in love with Free Speech, not just argument; to my way of thinking ‘Civil Conversation’ should be like watching those debate scenes in LINCOLN, with an emphasis on putting across points as sharply and as wittily as possible).
Heck, it recently struck me that LOWER DECKS missed a trick in not making a Tellarite character part of their cast, since Tellarites being literally and figuratively pig-headed is a classically cartoony detail (and the Tellarites’ tendency to conversation-by-insult would absolutely fit both the show’s tendency to deliver dialogue at the babble AND it’s sense of humour*).
*Bonus points if the Tellarite in question is the very sweetest personality with the very sharpest possible tongue.
I think that there was always a tension between Enterprise being “the story of mankind’s first big reach for the stars” and being “the story of how the United Federation of Planets came to be.” One of those stories allows you a huge amount of flexibility to see new things and meet new people. The other has a set endgame and is much harder to make interesting to a wider audience. I think the producers of the first three seasons were much more attached to the first type of story, while the network – through its imposition of future elements like the Temporal Cold War – wanted to see more of the second.
F
I enjoyed most of the arc mini-series in season 4, even the Augments, the weakest. This arc gave us a reasonable explanation of the how the Romulan war could be conducted without the allied species ever seeing them.
I do agree I would have liked to see more of the Andorians and expecially the Tellarites throughout the series.
This is partly a test.
@3 – The FASA RPG established Andor as an icy planet years before Among the Clans.
@24/Twels – I think Enterprise was always going to have to become about the founding of the Federation because they made the choice to set it only 10 years before the UFP was founded. If they’d wanted to do a straight series about explorers from Earth first venturing out in to deep space and not a prequel, then they should have set it earlier in the century.
@27/jaime: I think the question here isn’t an all-or-nothing one about whether they should’ve addressed the founding of the Federation at all. It’s just a question of how heavy the emphasis on that would be — whether continuity setup would be a constant, overriding focus as in season 4, an occasional bit of foreshadowing as in season 1, or somewhere in between. As with most things in life, the best balance would probably be somewhere in the middle. As I suggested, if they’d worked in those elements more gradually in seasons 2-3, maybe they wouldn’t have been so overemphasized in season 4 to the exclusion of straight-up exploration stories. They could’ve gradually built up those elements in a steady progression, instead of subtly hinting at them one year, virtually ignoring them in the next two, then doing virtually nothing else in the fourth.
Really, for all S4’s strengths, it almost completely abandons exploration as a story driver. Almost the entire season is galactic politics and conflicts. The one-parters are the only exceptions. “Daedalus” is about scientific experimentation, and “Observer Effect” and “Bound” are essentially first contact or early-contact stories. But even they have continuity-setup aspects, quite unnecessarily so in the case of “Observer.”
The other casualty of season 4’s big galactic politics approach, besides exploration, is the same one as season 3. We stopped having episodes devoted to the secondary characters. Hoshi Sato doesn’t get a big spotlight until the Mirror Universe outing in a few weeks. Travis Mayweather and Malcolm Reed don’t even get that much.
I was never a fan of duels and fights to the death as a story device, whether they had consequences or not. I wasn’t the biggest fan of “Amok Time”, and the same can be said of episodes like “Tsunkatse” and others. But ENT’s “United” has at least a good reason for the set piece – even though it still felt tacked on. It’s a major character turning point for Shran, having to move past the pain, the loss, and also placate rising tensions among the Andorians.
And I find the solution of cutting off the antennae to be quite the clever one. Death would be the easy solution in this case. This way, Shran can see with his eyes that violence can’t always be the ‘ends justify the means’ approach to every problem. This is crucial for moving past the prejudice and put yourself in the shoes of the other person. A major step towards the founding of the Federation.
Plus, we get some very well-written cat and mouse games with the Romulans, keeping things lively.
Interesting that Livingston’s final Trek outing wasn’t an atmospheric entry where he got to play with the camera, cinematography and editing the way he did in so many others, namely his very first, TNG’s “Mind’s Eye”, with the claustrophobic Manchurian-esque camera angles. There are some nice shots during the duel, but nothing that stands out.
@29/Eduardo – Travis, as I recall, gets a few good character moments in “Demons” / “Terra Prime”. It’s not much, but it’s still better than he’s gotten since the second season.
And Reed has a significant plotline coming up in “Affliction”/”Divergence”.
@1/cap-mjb: Agreed, I loved the Remans making an appearance.
@9/wyatt-rubel: Me too, I also didn’t buy how easily Archer got the upper hand against a trained practitioner of that style of combat.
@20/FRT: I also agree. I wasn’t a fan of how easily Tallas was taken down by Gral’s aide in part one either.
@32/Thierafhal: “I also didn’t buy how easily Archer got the upper hand against a trained practitioner of that style of combat.”
But that’s a perennial trope in fiction, isn’t it? That’s why I never buy all those online debates about which action hero or which starship would win a battle based on their power stats and skills — because in fiction, it’s usually the underdog who wins against overwhelming odds, since upset victories are more dramatic and heroic. The more the odds are stacked against the hero, the more inevitable it is that they’ll triumph through cleverness or persistence or a superior desire to prevail or the cosmos implicitly being on their side.
Even in real life, superior skill or experience never absolutely guarantees victory; if it did, there’d be no point in competing at all. They improve the odds of victory, but there’s always the chance of an upset.
In this case, Shran was probably handicapped by his reluctance to kill Archer. Whereas Archer wasn’t trying to kill Shran, merely to temporarily incapacitate him, so he had no reason to hold back.
I think this isn’t as big a defense as people might think because Prequels can be both fanservice for continuity nerds (like you wrote for and I and many of your fans are) as well as attracting a larger audience. HOUSE OF THE DRAGON is all about the prequels to GAME OF THRONES but it’s also appealing in regards to people who just want dragons, pretty people scheming against one another, and more dragons.
We may argue that ENT being a prequel was a good or bad decision but I feel like its nature suffered for not providing more of what even casual Trek fans would have wanted from it. Instead of the Xindi, people would have wanted Romulans. Instead of a temporal cold war, maybe we could have had more Federation. The Star Wars Prequels get a lot of insults but they made a massive lasting franchise in THE CLONE WARS that has largely overshadowed the complaints about it.
And it kind of ties to your point. No, the non-hardcore Trekkies wouldn’t be here for Andorians but was anyone here for the Suliban?
@34/C.T. Phipps: As I already clarified, I wasn’t saying season 4’s focus on continuity made it bad; I was saying that the show would never have been allowed to focus so heavily on Trek lore if the network execs hadn’t already given up on the show and stopped worrying about attracting a wider audience, which liberated the producers to focus more heavily on the inside-baseball Trek lore than they’d been able to before. My point is that making it more continuity-heavy would not have given it higher ratings, because that’s appealing to a narrower audience, the hardcore fanbase who were essentially the only ones still watching by that point.
After all, there is no correlation between ratings and quality, especially if you’re talking about anything of specialized or niche interest. Networks go after ratings by trying to give things broad, generic appeal, so it’s only the more niche-focused stuff that’s able to be more specialized and distinctive. Look at all the specialized, niche cable channels that used to exist until ratings pressures made them change their programming to be more generic and lowest-common-denominator. CourtTV focused on trials and legal issues, Discovery was an educational channel, A&E stood for Arts & Entertainment and showed classy programming. But they all degenerated into inane reality TV because of the pressures of ratings. The quest for popularity is bad for quality or individuality. That’s why I figure ENT didn’t go all-out in embracing Trek lore until it was already doomed in the ratings and had nothing to lose by going niche.
“No, the non-hardcore Trekkies wouldn’t be here for Andorians but was anyone here for the Suliban?”
I will never understand why people assume prior familiarity with a character or concept is necessary for it to succeed. Everything has to start somewhere. Nobody had ever heard of Luke Skywalker before 1977. Nobody had ever heard of Sherlock Holmes before A Study in Scarlet was published. For that matter, nobody really cared that much about Andorians until ENT and Jeffrey Combs made them cool. Relying on prior familiarity is not a requirement, it’s a crutch. A completely new concept can succeed if it’s done well. That’s all that matters. Look at the Ferengi — nobody was excited by TNG’s mediocre handling of them, but DS9 took a different approach and made them fan favorites. Execution matters more than nostalgia.
I was gutted by Talas’ death, mainly because I love take-no-shit female characters, but also I really liked her for Shran (was this Suzie Plakson’s character played by a different actor?)
This is where Enterprise finally felt like the show it was supposed to be all along. Of course, around the time this episode aired, Enterprise had been canceled. So it was bittersweet going into this stretch of episodes. I remember reading about Enterprise being canceled back in February ’05, but learning it came after one of the show’s best episodes is definitely bittersweet.
Sure feels good to post again. It’s definitely been a long road…
@36/DanteHopkins: “(was this Suzie Plakson’s character played by a different actor?)”
No, Suzie Plakson’s Season 2 character was Tarah, who was revealed as a traitor and last seen under arrest. Talas was first seen in Season 3.