To Boldly Step Forward (Enterprise: Season 3) [3.1]

PREVIOUSLY ON "TO BOLDLY STEP FORWARD": 

I mean what I said just above with The Expanse, though; I'm absolutely terrified for what may come. There's a Star Trek arc I haven't visited, the latter years of Deep Space Nine. They had a big extended arc called the Dominion War, and from what I understand it's peak grimdark "there are no heroes" nonsense. Far be it from me to critique your own personal taste if you liked this, but the thought of this doesn't sit right with me. Throwing a redux of it into Enterprise would... lessen my love for the show, I feel. I just have this anxious sense that the second I put this live, one of you who knows what's coming is going to rub their hands in glee and tell me to buckle up. I'm pre-emptively buckling right now, so there's that. I love you, Enterprise. Don't betray me for the grimdark like Sailor Moon did.


AND NOW, THE CONCLUSION...


Part Three: Strength Of The Soul


In case you forgot where we left off, a little primer: A mysterious probe has blasted the shit out of Florida and killed seven million people. Upon investigation, an alien race known as the Xindi are responsible. One problem in stopping them; they live in the Delphi Expanse, a region of space that is full of strange anomalies that the Vulcans insist will fuck us up in all of two seconds flat if Enterprise goes in. Regardless, we're going in. Archer, the Enterprise crew, and some soldiers are going on a long-term journey into the vast Expanse in order to find the Xindi and stop them from launching a bigger weapon to blow up Earth. The tension isn't just from whether or not we'll succeed, but whether or not this show will succumb to grimdark war arc horseshit. Can we keep our proto-utopian ideals, even in this hell world of space? Let's find out. Together.



The Xindi: Well, here we are. Six weeks into the Expanse and we have nothing to show for it beyond the vaguest of clues. Of course, there's also some wild new shit going on. From what I've been told, the Xindi arc encompasses the whole damn season, so I'd better comment on a bunch of the stuff that crackles as I go through. I've also been told I'll need a hell of a lot of Intrusions From The Future as the situation changes, so we'll see about that. What we have, first of all, is a mysterious shadow cabal which reminds me of Star Wars Episode 2: that is, a bunch of spooky nefarious alien antagonists plotting against our Enterprise and to build a weapon. We also have a military squad on board Enterprise now, because We're At War. Yeah, let's make no bones about it. Wayyyy back in "Shadows Of P'Jem" in season 1 I made a thing about that story being haunted by 9/11 in retrospect. Here and now, in fall 2003 (Christ, we keep coming back to that, don't we?), we get Enterprise's actual response to it. As for the rest of the episode, we have a Xindi being held at a slave labor camp, along with Archer and Trip's attempts to get info on the Xindi homeworld out of him. You can tell things have gotten darker because we're a lot rougher to this guy just because he's a Xindi, and there's no moralizing about breaking everyone out. "Detained" this is not, and our Xindi pal does not survive... but he does give the co-ordinates to his homeworld! Which... was destroyed 120 years ago. Hmm. I do smell some timey wimey Temporal War business going on. Who's to say that the inciting event in the Xindi coming to wipe us out to save themselves happened in the 26th century? Humanity could have gone back and done it themselves... or some other faction, framing us. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: Interesting theory, but the Xindi blew up their own homeworld themselves.) Either way, this is... a start.

Hate it when reality warping makes my coffee float.

Anomaly: Something I neglected to critique in "The Xindi" was the letdown nature of the Expanse. The actual episode that capped off Season 2 seemed to suggest that even a little exposure to this place would turn you inside out while making you see hallucinations which drove you mad. Enterprise had been in it for six weeks according to the previous episode, and all that happened was some cargo was moving back and forth. "Anomaly" opens with a goddamn money shot of weird shit happening with the laws of physics. That's a little more like it. I did enjoy this episode a deal more than the previous, and it's because there's a little more subtext going on under the hood. Enterprise gets robbed of a bunch of tech it needs to survive by an alien race called the Osaarians, but they manage to capture one and Archer's attempts to get info from him about where his buddies went, as well as the Xindi, are almost metacommentary on Enterprise getting dark in this arc. The Osaarian straight up says that you have to be hard as fuck and amoral to survive in the Expanse (read: Season 3), and Archer actually throws him into the airlock and depressurizes him as a means of torture. Yes. Our gallant hero space waterboards a man to get info out of him. I'm hoping the show will walk back on Dark Archer and have him reject it, but we'll see. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: HAHAHA JUST YOU FUCKIN' WAIT UNTIL "DAMAGE"!!! On a more serious note, though, having now watched the extra features for Season 3? John Billingsly actually agrees with me that this is a step too far. He had no real say on its inclusion or anything, and he had no word on the similar "crossing a line" sequence in "Damage", but it's good to know someone involved in the production of this stuff was on the same page I'm on.) At least the mysterious Sphere that the Osaarians are using as their base is some real cosmic weird beauty. It's good to see that, even here in the Expanse. Oh yeah, and we downloaded all their files on the Xindi. Now let's bask in the knowledge of this being pretty good, and see what we can learn...

Both Brannon Braga and director LeVar Burton were ashamed
of this episode. Can you tell why?

Extinction: Um. So, since I haven't mentioned it yet and this episode is a bonkers one-off with no apparent Xindi arc involvement, let's talk about the opening for a bit since it's both a follow up on a subplot I should have mentioned at first and the Chekov's Gun for solving the problem to come. Tucker can't sleep because he's still having bad dreams over his dead sister, so T'Pol is giving him Vulcan neuropressure treatments to help him relax. The introduction of this had some really gratuitous shots of Jolene Blalock sideboob and handbra, but you know what? I'll let it slide because the idea of these two growing closer and the platonic idea of healing is a good sugar pill following all this grimdark. So what do we get here? Uhhh. Archer, Reed, and Hoshi mutating into aliens thanks to a virus. I thought it was just something the Expanse was doing, but this virus was created by the aliens since they became sterile and needed to propagate their species, so when you get infected you get a primal urge to return to your origin point. Except some other aliens wanting to quarantine the whole thing and burn anyone infected come in, there's lots of fighting and they really want to roast everyone who's come in contact with the virus but our crew doesn't wanna. Aside from being utterly bonkers Star Trek that turns three of our crew into weird primitive shaggy-haired aliens, it's fairly standard. T'Pol and the opening are key to fixing things 'cause she's got some immunity and her DNA is still on a peach Tucker gave her in the opening. Yeah uhh... this was an episode. I guess. Even in the Expanse we can do weird one-offs. Archer swearing to keep the last trace of the virus in order to keep the aliens alive in some regard is an interesting choice, and one of a man who's not quite prepared to commit genocide. I like that. Let's move on.


Rajiin: Um, part two. So we get the crew heading down to some alien planet to barter for the formula to make trellium-D, an alloy which will protect the ship against all that anomaly stuff and presumably keep them all from turning inside out in the Expanse. Then through misadventures Archer rescues a slave girl, the titular Rajiin, and... things happen. Rajiin is actually a Xindi spy sent here to get intel on humanity so the Xindi can perfect their bioweapon, and even in the midst of our weird Attack Of The Clones knockoff with the Xindi Shadow Council or whoever they be, we can see some... animosity. Speaking of animosity, it's what I have with this episode. Because Rajiin has some weird erotic sensual powers and she... uses them. Eyebrow-raising at first, but then she goes and does it to T'Pol. While T'Pol is saying "no no no". And she continues. Yes, T'Pol gets sci-fi raped again and this time it's not even to serve a plotline like in "Fusion". Jesus. This episode made me write about "Fusion" in a favorable light, how dare. This is the ultimate endpoint of Enterprise's strange fixation on titillating the audience; non-consensual space alien erotic touching done solely because ah huh huh lesbians is hot. At least the episode gets interesting when Rajiin makes her turn and the Xindi come to get her. We get a shootout and... the Xindi win. They get Rajiin out and get her intel on human biology to make their bio weapon to kill us all. That's bad. Sci-fi rape is bad. I'd say so long Rajiin, but I get the feeling she's going to come back. Yikes. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: Never mentioned again, that Rajiin. As gross as all this is, given how the Xindi bioweapon stuff ends up being both time fuckery and the touchstone with which Archer will get the Xindi to listen to him later, the show did miss a trick by not bringing Rajiin back, I feel.)


Impulse: Some very... interesting choices in this one. We have an overt horror episode with what are basically Vulcan zombies. That is to say, Vulcans whose synapses have degenerated thanks to trellium poisoning and are now all green and feral. Their wrecked ship drifting in the middle of a trellium asteroid field is dimly lit, with lots of strobe lighting, and the framerate seems to jump up in places to make things feel more surreal. The mood of this episode is top notch spooky, is what I'm saying. Oh yeah, and T'Pol is on board as well and slowly starts to feel the same symptoms. We're really putting Jolene Blalock through the wringer this season, aren't we? I get some vibes akin to "The Seventh" as she slowly loses control of her emotions and becomes more anxious and agitated, leaving Archer to be the voice of logical reason doing his best to calm her down and keep everyone safe. In the end, things work out, but not without the death of all the poor affected Vulcans who the crew can do nothing for. Oh, and Archer has a lovely line which I'll quote for you now. "I can't try to save humanity without holding on to what makes me human." Which, thank God for that pushback against the grimdark. The best we got is a final nightmare with gonzo angles for poor T'Pol. Let's hope her getting fucked up by this isn't part of the arc, and continue onwards...


Exile: It's close to totally working, but that one conflict they add fucks with that. We've got a Hoshi-focused episode, as she's "compatible" enough to receive telepathic messages from an alien on a nearby planet. There are some real weird and wild dreamy sequences at the front end of this, and it's when the telepathic Tarquin offers to help use his powers to sense the psychic imprint of some Xindi stuff the Enterprise has on hand, in order to track them down, that I colored myself interested. So we have an A plot that's kind of like Star Trek meets Beauty And The Beast, and a B plot that crackles with more arc stuff. Yeah, so that sphere thing from "Anomaly"? There's more than one, and they give off auras of radiation or something... and the points where they intersect are actually the sources (and cause) of all the weird fuckery going on in the Expanse! Holy shit, the Expanse's gonzo nightmare world properties were engineered! So why doesn't this totally work? Tarquin. This is actually Star Trek doing Beauty And The Beast in reverse. The nice alien living in isolated exile for being telepathic is actually a manipulative emotional abuser, so desperate for companionship (because he's either immortal or lives a very long life, long enough for four other companions to have come and gone) that he tries everything to get Hoshi to stay with him forever. First asking her normally, then trying to fool her into thinking Archer is asking her to, then threatening to keep the life support on Enterprise off until Hoshi agrees to live with him. Naturally, she tells him to fuck right off. I was disappointed they needed to add that conflict and make him a shitheel; if you want conflict and drama in the episode, surely the wild shit with the sphere in the B plot is enough of a happening? Either way, Tarquin still does give some info on the Xindi, so good on him for being that decent at least. We'll have to see where it leads, but for now I have to ding this one. It still only dings down to "very good" but it was so so close to being a major standout. Ah well.


The Shipment: Ahh, there we go. Some hope in the midst of this big scary grimdark arc. With the info from last episode, we end up at a Xindi science facility of some sort where some... stuff called kemocite is being manufactured. It's going to power the big Earth-killing weapon, is the point of it, so Archer and pals infiltrate and manage to hold one of the Xindi scientists hostage... who has no goddamn idea what in the hell Archer is angrily talking about involving Earth and the weapon. Surprise surprise, this isn't a united front. Gralik, our scientist pal, just works by commission and doesn't have the full story. He and his pals just made a shitload of this kemocite without really thinking of what it'd be used for. Hey, some nuance! How about it! Archer eventually comes around and believes him, and the pair work together to undermine the shipment in subtle ways so that Degra (the guy accepting the shipment and part of the Xindi Shadow Parliment or whatever it is we keep seeing who are plotting the end of humanity) doesn't get handed the keys to blowing the fuck out of Earth. It's a tenuous trust, but a trust nonetheless. Both Archer and Gralik know that the other isn't plotting the extermination of their species, and this is the kind of thing I really like to see. We still don't know why humanity in the future is gunning for the Xindi, but if we can find our redemption here in the past, and make a peace with them? That near-genocide may be averted. It may not work in every case, but this is Star Trek. It's worth a try. We'll see how Archer takes this moving forward, but this is a really good one either way.


Twilight: Oh boy, it's one of those what if/bad end episodes! I don't mean bad end in that the ending is shitty, I mean that it's like a "what if we fucked up the Xindi mission" alternate timeline thing. Caused by, of all things, an Expanse anomaly infecting Archer with quantum Alzheimer's parasites, such that he loses his short term memory. He loses command of Enterprise because of it, and that leads down a whole chain of Earth getting blown up by the Xindi superweapon and humanity being hunted down, all while T'Pol decides to stay at Archer's side because he got his space disease trying to save her life. I found it quite touching and a great show of how these two support and learn from each other, even when the other is medically incapable of retaining those lessons. There's some romantic undertones but they don't kiss or anything, so we'll leave that to the shippers. Either way, things end with the most bad end possible, that being Archer blowing up the Enterprise after everyone else has been killed by the Xindi, in order to blow up the rest of his space parasites. Yeah they uh... live outside of time, so killing them in the bad future also kills them in the past, which means that blasting them all would keep him from getting sick in the first place and reset time. I don't know, it's a handy dandy reset button. Nerds like to yell about episodes like this that technically didn't happen... but I'm glad for this one. It puts our lead in a vulnerable place, shows a devoted friendship with T'Pol, and gets a shitload of grimdark out of the way (hopefully) by biting the bullet and letting the Xindi win for 45 minutes. Now let's see how we avert that bad end.


North Star: This was good, albeit out of left field. Roughly halfway into the Expanse/Xindi season, about the last thing I expected this show to do was a Wild West period piece. We don't even have a holodeck to easily justify it like TNG did back in "A Fistful Of Datas", so the premise we get is wild: Aliens abducted humans in the 19th century to work as slaves on some colony, but they rebelled and overthrew them and are now in charge. They haven't changed a bit and are still in full on Wild West mode, and now they're the ones oppressing the alien Skagarans, not allowing them basic rights like learning how to read out of long-standing fear that they'll rise up. So, they oppress the shit out of these people and some of them are real shitheels while they do it. This is another one of those episodes that's weird to come to from my own personal background. I'm a longtime Doctor Who fan, and I can't help but view these sci-fi allegories through the lens of that show. If the Doctor Who I liked showed up here? The show would spare no mercies in upending this entire oppressive and racist society, and giving the oppressive racists the comeuppance they deserve. Star Trek, more often than not, doesn't do that. Sometimes I bitch about its morals not lining up with Who's, but in this case I like the Star Trek answer to the problem. Star Trek's answer is to show the Wild West what humanity has become in the 22nd century. It has a long way to go until the TNG era, mind, but there's still a spark of utopian idealism and the elimination of intolerance and prejudice. Star Trek doesn't violently overthrow the Wild West. It shows the Wild West that it can be better, giving it a chance to learn and grow and change with the knowledge of the future. As left field as doing a rooty tooty cowboy episode is in the middle of the Xindi arc, this is actually an important lesson to keep in mind. After all, if the Wild West can learn and change thanks to humanity's future optimism, maybe we and the Xindi can work together to do the same...


Similitude: On paper, this works. It's ethical drama with difficult choices involving idealism vs. practicality and it made me cry at the end. I'm going to poke at it a bit anyway. Trip gets put into a coma while trying to make the warp engines go faster, and in order to cure him Archer and Phlox make a bit of a morally grey choice; they do an illegal medical procedure involving an alien larva and Trip's DNA to create a clone of Trip who will live out an entire human lifespan in 15 days, planning to get a tissue sample from his brain when his age matches the original Trip in order to heal him. Now, I should mention that the cold open has Trip laying dead in a space torpedo, so I was left wondering if they were really going to pull the trigger on this and where the other 30 minutes of episode were going to go once he got fucked up. Once we introduce cloning, we get a sense where this is going. "Sim", as the clone is dubbed, also has all of Trip's memories as he ages along over the course of a week, so we've got some basic transhumanism concerns in regards to his own personhood and his anxieties over the crew keeping him at arm's length because "he's not the real Trip". Which, baloney. That's a Trip. You created a second Trip. It's only stubbornness, stubbornness I would have hoped this future would have moved past, that says otherwise. It's a difficult situation, nonetheless, and Sim fights for his right to exist as best he can... but we're pulling a phrase from the future. Practicality wins out here in the Expanse. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, even as it's revealed that Sim won't survive his brain surgery. It's Sim that gets blasted off in a space torpedo (just like the guy who did/will say that quote), and yeah. I cried. It is a good dramatic episode, but I still managed to poke at it anyway. Let's just call it good enough and move on.


Carpenter Street: Ah yes. Two episodes after Enterprise's wild decision to do a period piece, we get the creative new decision to do [checks notes] a period piece. Okay, I'm being cheeky there. The "period" is actually the present day of 2004, and there's no hoop jumping or anything; it actually is Earth in 2004. There's some Xindi who have gone back in time to do bioweapon research on humans, based on what they learned back in "Rajiin", and they're paying some shitty guy to abduct people with all different blood types so they can do it. Good old Daniels shows up to remind us that yes, this is tied into the Temporal Cold War and the Xindi stuff shouldn't be happening, and then we get Archer and T'Pol in 2004, hunting down the Xindi to save the future. This is kind of interesting crunchy stuff, not least because we have the metaphorical War on Terror that the Xindi arc is, juxtaposed with the actual point in time the real War on Terror happened. Loomis, the shitty guy stealing people for money, only expresses remorse when he thinks that the people he's working for might be terrorists. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: Loomis? Carpenter Street? Someone likes Halloween. It doesn't... really go anywhere, some nerd just really liked Halloween.) When you get down to it, this is a premise not unlike, say, Star Trek IV (which happens to be my favorite Trek movie, actually) only filtered through both the grim determination of the Xindi arc and the grim actuality of the GWB years. Even then it manages to get some comedy; "A Starfleet captain and a Vulcan go to a burger drive-thru" is a gag worth doing and I wish to God I could find it on Youtube to share with pals (and you, reader!). In the end, the day is saved, and we're one step closer to stopping the Xindi... be it peacefully or violently. Daniels doesn't know which it will be, and neither do I. Either way, a good one.



Chosen Realm: I didn't care for this one. It made me uncomfy and it's brazenly on-the-nose in some aspects, as well as subtly smug in others. Enterprise helps out this group of religious explorers whose ship malfunctioned. These guys are, it should be stated, super hardcore devotees who worship those mysterious Spheres that are causing the anomalies, even proclaiming all the reality warping as the breath of the Makers. (That would be the Makers of the Spheres.) Anyway, they promptly repay Archer's hospitality by hijacking the ship via using themselves as threatened suicide bombers. Let's just... take a step back. Religious extremist antagonists who are literal suicide bombers. In 2003. There's only one way to read that, and it's so brazenly tone-deaf I do not even know where to begin. More to the point, there's this whole smug superior "science vs. religion" undercurrent going through the episode that makes me think its writer (Manny Cota, who's got production credits on this show right about now and wrote the earlier "Similitude") is some kind of atheist. T'Pol's conversation with D'Jamat, leader of the extremists, at dinner the night before he enacts his plan is some straight-up "NUH UH SCIENCE PROVES YOUR FAITH WRONG" stuff. Then there's the transporter scene. Archer, through some convoluted stuff, is going to be put to death as a heretic for researching the sacred Spheres that these people worship, so he asks to be humanely and painlessly killed in Enterprise's "waste disposal chamber". Which is actually just the transporter beaming him to a different part of the ship so he can go into hiding and plot to take his ship back. It may seem innocent, but given everything else there's this nasty undercurrent of "LOOK AT THE RELIGIOUS DUMBASS, DOESN'T EVEN KNOW ABOUT TELEPORTATION, WE SHOWED HIM!". There are also all sorts of conversations where D'Jamat tries to convince Archer that they're not so different and that they're mirrors of each other, both willing to do Bad Things to achieve their noble goal of Saving Their People. D'Jamat gets to try and throw Archer's airlock torture from back in "Anomaly" back in his face, and I guess that definitely helps to prove that this show's going to reject the grimdark because Archer's entire stance this episode is "what in the fuck are you talking about, we're in no way the same, I want to prevent war and you want to start a holy cleanse of all nonbelievers." Yeah. D'Jamat wants to use Enterprise to cleanse his planet of everyone who doesn't believe in the Makers. Oh my good lord. Archer gets a "gotcha" of his own when he takes back the ship using science to disable their genetic suicide bombs (see that science vs. religion angle is still there) and return them all to their home planet... which has become a desolate shithole due to holy war. Archer's parting comment is something along the lines of "YOU WANTED PEACE? YOU GOT IT, FUCKO, ENJOY YOUR WASTELAND". Embellishment by me. This just... made me really uncomfortable. Its smug aura disturbs me. Let's get away from it as fast as possible.

(Continued in 3.2)