“Zero Hour”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 3, Episode 23
Production episode 076
Original air date: May 26, 2004
Date: February 14, 2154
Captain’s star log. On the Reptilian ship, Dolim gathers his senior staff for a celebratory meal of live mice. They even raise the mice like they’re making a toast. Dolim also wishes the Guardians had made the Reptilians the dominant species on Xindi—then their homeworld would still be in one piece and the Avians wouldn’t be extinct…
On Degra’s ship, Archer instructs the ailing Sato to decrypt the schematics for the weapon, which Degra encrypted. They’re also starting to catch up to the weapon, though they’re still too far to tell how much of an escort the weapon has.
In the Sphere-Builders’ dimension, they’re concerned that the number of timelines where they succeed are diminishing, despite the imminent arrival of the weapon in the Sol system. They resolve to act more directly, including picking up the alteration of space around Sphere #41, the one Enterprise is heading toward.
On Enterprise, Tucker is worried about being able to maintain the deflector beam they’ve modified to mess with the sphere. But T’Pol tells him to go ahead regardless of the consequences—the Sphere-Builders have to be stopped, especially since it seems unlikely that they will settle for only destroying Earth and only altering the Delphic Expanse.
Mayweather detects a lot more spatial anomalies around the sphere than expected, and Phlox confirms that the space near the sphere—including where they need to go to destroy it—will now kill everyone on board. He synthesizes a neuroleptic compound that will stave off the effects for about a quarter of an hour, but that’s the best he can do. Unfortunately, Tucker needs the power from the impulse engines to make the deflector beam work, which means Mayweather has to pilot them on thrusters, while staying in the fifteen-minute window.
Sato is having trouble focusing, partly because she’s not entirely recovered from being tortured by Dolim, partly due to guilt over what she did when in Dolim’s thrall. Archer gets her to focus on Degra’s encryption.
Archer then informs Reed that Sato will go with them to the weapon, as she’s been there and can guide them to where they have to go.
Then Daniels snatches the captain and brings him to 2161, when Archer will be present for the signing of the charter that forms the United Federation of Planets. Daniels urges Archer to not go on the away mission, as he can’t risk his life for the sake of the future. Archer tells Daniels to go fuck himself and send him back to 2154, please, as he has a homeworld to save.
When he gets back, he’s informed that only Dolim’s ship is escorting the weapon. The Insectoid ships are nowhere to be found.
Dolim’s ship comes out of the vortex. For some reason, despite the planet being in danger of attack, the number of Starfleet ships protecting Earth is zero. There’s just one outpost, Yosemite Station, which Dolim destroys to remind us all what a creep he is. (The live mice lunch wasn’t enough?)
Enterprise approaches the sphere. The skin of everyone on the bridge starts to dry out and crack, which Phlox says is expected, and to not scratch it. Three Sphere-Builders materialize on board and start sabotaging the ship. Phlox figures the space they’re in is altered enough so that the Sphere-Builders can thrive. He tells the MACOs to alter the frequency of their phase rifles to something that will harm them. (On the regular setting, the beams just pass through.)
Shran shows up and provides cover for Degra’s ship, protecting them long enough to get in range for Archer, Reed, Sato, and the MACOs to beam on board. Sato leads Archer to the control section for the weapon, and Sato instructs him on the sequence he needs to follow to overload the weapon. A MACO holds off one Reptilian for a bit, but is eventually killed—then Reed kills the Reptilian. However, in the fight, Sato loses her datapad, and has to instruct Archer from memory.
Archer instructs Reed, Sato, and the surviving MACOs to beam back; he’ll follow after he’s laid charges on the weapon. As he’s doing that, Dolim attacks. Archer gets his ass kicked, but he slips one of the charges onto Dolim’s shoulder and blows him up.
Enterprise is barely able to collapse Sphere 41, which has a cascade effect on the other spheres. The Sphere-Builders scream and dematerialize back to their own dimension. The entire sphere network collapses.
The weapon blows up. Earth is saved, as are the Xindi and all the other denizens of the Expanse. Archer is believed to have been killed when the weapon went boom.
An Aquatic ship escorts Enterprise back to the Sol system, but when they arrive on Earth, nobody replies. Mayweather and Tucker take a shuttle to San Francisco, only to be menaced by planes shooting bullets.
We cut to what appears to be a German field hospital from the World War II era. Archer is one of the patients, and he’s about to be interrogated by some Nazi officers—one of whom is an alien…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently destroying one sphere destroys the entire network, which is incredibly convenient…
The gazelle speech. Archer manly-mans his way through the entire episode, refusing to let anyone else do anything important unless it’s absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, one of those things is decryption, for which he needs the very very very badly hurt Sato…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol is very obviously only just barely holding it together emotionally speaking at this point, but she manages it, and does an excellent job commanding Enterprise as they do the thing. As one sign that she’s not entirely herself (or, at the very least, that she’s warming to Tucker), she finally admits to Tucker how old she is, something the engineer has been wondering about for three years now. (She’s almost 66.)
Florida Man. Florida Man Saves The Day With Technobabble!
Optimism, Captain! Phlox is at the tactical station on the bridge for no compellingly good reason during the climax, regularly dispensing wisdom on how to deal with the Sphere-Builders and their icky changes to space.
Good boy, Porthos! Phlox continues to care for Porthos in Archer’s absence, and T’Pol actually pets him and talks to him as she and the doctor discuss the pooch’s fate in light of Archer’s apparent death.
Blue meanies. For some inexplicable reason, they did not play the Mighty Mouse theme when Shran showed up.
Better get MACO. A MACO named Forbes is the unsung hero of this episode, as he stops a Reptilian from killing Sato and Archer and holds the Reptilian off for precious moments that allow the other two to continue their sabotage. The Reptilian eventually kills Forbes, but still, that holding action was critical. And the poor bastard didn’t even get mentioned by anyone. We only know his name from the patch on his shirt….
I’ve got faith…
“Tell Archer we’re not even anymore—he owes me!”
–Shran keeping score.
More on this later… Daniels brings Archer to the signing of the Federation charter. Speculation among fans had this as being around 2161 and that the founding worlds of the Federation were Earth, Vulcan, Tellar, and Andor. TNG had codified the 2161 date in “The Outcast,” and this episode does likewise for the founding planets. (Though some fan speculations had Alpha Centauri as a fifth founding world.)
Welcome aboard. The great Jeffrey Combs is back for a rather gratuitous appearance as Shran, but it’s Combs as Shran, so who cares? Matt Winston returns for an even more gratuitous appearance as Daniels, though that’s mostly to set up season four’s opening two-parter.
Several more recurring regulars make their final appearance: Scott MacDonald as Dolim (who is killed), Rick Worthy as Jannar, Tucker Smallwood as the Primate councilor, Josette Di Carlo, Mary Mara, and Ruth Williamson as the Sphere-Builders, and Bruce Thomas and Andrew Borba as Dolim’s soldiers (who are also killed).
And finally, stunt performer Michael J. O’Laskey plays the poor unfortunate Forbes.
Trivial matters: This episode closes out the Xindi arc that started at the end of season two with “The Expanse.” It’s the last appearance of any of the Xindi species until Prodigy’s “Crossroads” and Discovery’s “…But to Connect.”
This episode also revives the Temporal Cold War arc, with Daniels being cryptic and stuff (and confirming fan theories about the founding of the Federation), and giving us a wacky time-travel adventure for a cliffhanger.
Finally, for something incredibly trivial, in an alphabetical listing of every Star Trek episode ever produced, this one would be last, as it’s the only Trek title that starts with the letter Z.
It’s been a long road… “Your captain’s sacrifice will not be forgotten.” All right, we need to start with this. The 11 September 2001 attacks were, as I type this, almost twenty-two years ago. And yet, Manhattan is still restricted airspace, very carefully regulated.
So why is Earth being left completely undefended? We know Archer is checking in with Earth and Vulcan High Command pretty regularly, so they must know that danger is imminent, plus Earth was directly attacked by these guys once already. Earth should be on high alert, and the months since the last attack should’ve been spent fortifying Earth’s defenses.
Instead, we get bupkiss aside from a nick-of-time arrival by Shran. Which is fine in and of itself, I guess, because Shran is fabulous, but where the hell is the rest of Starfleet? Were they on a coffee break? What the hell?
The rest of it is an exercise in artificial suspense while barreling toward a foregone conclusion. All the interesting stuff—Degra’s change of heart, Archer convincing three-fifths of the Xindi Council to back off their plan to commit genocide, etc.—happened in previous episodes. This leaves us with just the Action Climax, and it’s pretty nowhere. Allan Kroeker directs it decently, at least. But aside from Sato’s struggles to keep her shit together (which Linda Park plays magnificently), there’s nothing compelling happening during these sequences, just a lot of generic shouting and posturing and clichés.
Ultimately, we’ve come full circle: the Xindi arc started out as a bunch of nonsense trying to kickstart a show that was, to say the least, moribund, and it ended with a bunch of nonsense. And it’s capped off by a truly bizarre-ass cliffhanger that promises more time-travel shenanigans from a show whose previous time-travel shenanigans have been, to say the least, painful.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido has stories in two new anthologies out now: Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups, which he also co-edited with Jonathan Maberry, and which features team-ups of classic characters (Keith paired H. Rider Haggard’s title character from She with the Yoruba goddess Egungun-oya), with other contriors including fellow Trek scribes David Mack, Greg Cox, Dayton Ward, Derek Tyler Attico, Kevin J. Anderson, Diana Dru Botsford, David A. McIntee, and Rigel Ailur; and Sherlock Holmes: Cases by Candlelight Volume 2, which has four tales of Holmes & Watson by Keith, Christopher D. Abbott, and two more fellow Trek scribes Michael Jan Friedman and Aaron Rosenberg.
