To Boldly Step Forward (Enterprise Season 4) [4.1]

PREVIOUSLY ON TO BOLDLY STEP FORWARD...

 We're also... not quite done, though. No, now we're seeding for next season. Enterprise gets home, but there's no answer from anybody and airplanes in San Francisco. Also Archer is... a badly injured patient in a Nazi medical camp in World War 2? And there's AN EVIL ALIEN NAZI??? I do not know what in the fuck is going on, and unravelling it is something for Season 4. For now, let's call this a good finale, call it quits on Season 3, and give those final thoughts on the Xindi arc...

... It's wild to think I only have one more season of this show left. One more go-around. Of course, we have a hell of a thing to resolve; the last-ever season cliffhanger for this show. We'll find out what the hell is up, in due time. Come and join me for one more adventure, won't you? Maybe we can actually get back to exploring... after we beat up some Nazis first, of course.

AND NOW, THE CONCLUSION...


Part 4: Faith Of The Heart


Well then. One more go around. I'm writing this bit after watching just the first episode, so this isn't going to be a summation of what the final season of this show was like or anything. I'm just setting my expectations. Thanks to chats with pals, I... don't actually know what my expectations are. On the one hand there are pals who tell me it's quite good. On the other, Season 4 has Manny Coto as a co-executive producer. He did some episodes I liked last year, debuting with "Similitude"... but he also wrote some television which I found to be insufferable pieces of shit, like "Chosen Realm". My opinion on his work so far is a click away, just above... but from what I understand he's also a Star Trek superfan. The kind who now has the keys to the car. Yeah, let's just say it. Season 4, from what I understand, is a reference porn nightmare that ties a bunch of shit into the original 60's Star Trek because this is a prequel series and also because we live in a goddamned hellscape where nostalgia for the 60's series has been driving Star Trek from here, apparently, to... OH THAT'S RIGHT IT'S STILL HAPPENING. I've actually been watching old 60's Trek reruns on Space channel in Canada every Monday night for a bit now. Cherry picking episodes, of course, but most of the ones I've seen have been quite good. Well, the 1960s aside. The upside to this is I finally get to see what nostalgic nerds have been losing their shit over for the last 50 years. The downside is, now none of this reference porn shit that's supposedly in Season 4 is going to fly over my head. If I had remained oblivious then I might be able to judge shit on its own merits... but, as we've seen in the past, if you're a piece of media that loudly yells "HEY REMEMBER THIS THING? WELL WE REMEMBER IT TOO AND ARE REMINDING YOU IT EXISTED, BE IMPRESSED BY ME LOOK LOOK LOOK!!!" then I am going to check the fuck out and be negatively impressed by your lack of originality. I do want to like this show and I'm not trying to prejudge it. I'm just laying out my own internal criteria for quality. We're in part 4 of this nonsense, so I hope you all know by now what I like and don't like about this show. With all that in mind, here we go.



Storm Front, Part I: Jesus. I almost feel like I owe Season 3 a fucking apology here. After flirting around with a war arc for 20-something episodes, the show is showing me how much worse it could be by actively throwing us into World War II. And it's not even historically accurate World War II, it's a nightmare scenario alternate reality where the Nazis have invaded the East Coast thanks to the assistance of some grey skinned red eyed EVIL ALIEN NAZIS. So it's Star Trek doing the new Wolfenstein games. Only a good decade before those fuckers came out. Wild. New York City is occupied, the White House has Nazi flags all over it, people are getting shot in the head by Nazis in the streets... this is a grim war episode, alright. It's fucking brutal, let's put it like that. Why's all this happening? TEMPORAL COLD WAR, BABY!! As a super-old Daniels explains while he's dying in sickbay... the EVIL ALIEN NAZIS are actually one of the most dangerous factions of the Temporal Cold War, who decided "fuck it" and went back in time to fuck everything up. Shit is beyond fucked, and even Silik comes in to try some shit. He just ends up stealing a shuttlepod and heading down to Earth though, so whatever the Suliban are up to yet I don't know. We are in an all-out time war now, with Vosk of the EVIL ALIEN NAZIS trying to build a super-conduit to get himself back to the future and like, secure his changing of Earth history on such a massive scale. You know, this really is the Temporal Cold War in a nutshell now that I think about it. The concept is really wild and interesting, but the execution? Well, about that... This is a two-parter so I don't know what goes down. I do know, thanks to the extras on last season's Blu-Ray, that the Temporal Cold War fizzles out right about here and leaves those threads dangling a bit. We'll construct headcanons and whatnot, but for now? We gotta save the future and beat those EVIL ALIEN NAZIS! LET'S GO! PUNCH 'EM IN THEIR EVIL ALIEN NAZI HEADS!

Enterprise has a dogfight over New York City with Nazi planes
equipped with lasers. This is gloriously dumb.

Storm Front, Part II: Less of a fizzle and more of a tidy snip for the Temporal Cold War. Really, the most interesting thing are Vosk's faction of EVIL ALIEN NAZIS. Well, I keep calling them that to be cute and keep a torch alive. What's going on here is actually kind of interesting for an antagonist; they're kind of like the temporal Borg. I'll try and explain that in brief; the Borg, on paper, are supposed to represent the dark id and unchecked imperialistic excesses of the Federation. Imposing their will upon others because they know it's the best there is. Only as spooky robot men who assimiliate you. Vosk and his pals are the same, but for time. They believe in using time travel to improve things... but they are the sole arbiters of what gets to be fucked around with. Think David Tennant's hubris in "The Waters Of Mars" in Doctor Who. This is interesting shit! This is like, the actual shit that the Prime Directive and Temporal Prime Directive are supposed to be in place to prevent. Instead we do stories like "OH GEE THIS WHOLE ISOLATED PLANET IS GOING TO DIE BUT THEY DON'T HAVE WARP SO CAN'T HELP 'EM". Archer basically calls Vosk out on this and the man, after going on about how they're not so different and whatnot, says he's not interested in having a philosophical discussion. He's saying all this, mind, while in full Nazi regalia. Shame that we, you know, just came off of a season where the ultimate villains were also master meddlers mucking about with time for their own selfish benefits because they knew best. Anyway, this was a good one and it does do what it can to end the loose ends. Silik is dead, which is a bit of a waste IMO. Vosk gets blown up, so all the timeline breaking he gets up to once he goes back to the future never happens and thus time is reset. Archer basically says to Daniels at the end that they're done fucking around with the Temporal Cold War, which might as well be the showrunners possessing the man and saying it directly. There are still a lot of unanswered questions and I'd prefer they did go on with this arc rather than the apparent continuity porn I'm going to get. I'll be salty about that later, but for now? We did it. We're home, and the final shot of Enterprise getting a welcome convoy made me real happy. I guess that wraps up the Xindi stuff, at long last. I imagine the next bit will be decompression from that. Maybe... just maybe we can get back to exploring the galaxy and finding weird shit now! FINGERS FUCKING CROSSED!!!


Home: Alright so we are decompressing, mostly, but this one does drag and it focuses a lot on a subplot that the show seems to find more interesting than it is. Archer goes hiking to get away from all the attention he's been getting, mostly because (as I spent too many words screaming endlessly about) he committed one or two teeny tiny war atrocities for the greater good and is now feeling guilty about it. If he didn't I'd still be concerned, but this is the logical progression from making your manly man do a bad; you make him feel real sad about it afterwards. He also has a lady captain colleague who I guess he used to date? And they smooch a bit while hiking? Okay? Oh, and then we have the fun Phlox subplot where one of the men who helped save Earth from destruction gets xenophobic shit thrown at him because humanity hates aliens now, I guess. 'Cause aliens cut a big crater through Florida. God damn it, I know this isn't quite the fully formed space utopia of the later shows, but did we have to do this? Really? Now our beloved doctor doesn't want to go out for dinner, and our Phlox deserves better. Lastly... T'Pol and Tucker go to Vulcan! We meet T'Pol's mom, who voluntarily resigned from her job at the science academy because the Vulcans wanted to punish T'Pol somehow for the P'Jem thing (Vulcans continue to be just the worst, huh?) and we also have Koss! Do you remember Koss? He's T'Pol's betrothed who was mentioned in "Breaking The Ice" back in Season 1 and forgotten all about ever since. Come to think of it, there are a lot of Season 1 callbacks in this episode. And a reference to the 60's episode "Amok Time" that I caught because, like I said, I've seen some 60's Trek so I can Chris Evans this shit and understand that reference. So now T'Pol wants to marry Koss to get her mother back her job, but Tucker is in love with T'Pol and oh my good god we've turned into a space romantic comedy. And not even a funny one! They are going full tilt with shipping T'Pol and Tucker, and I dunno. I kind of liked that they had sex but were mature enough to stay friends after. Y'know, a friends with benefits thing. Anyway this one ends on the cliffhanger of the wedding. Watch as we get the Vulcan equivalent of "speak now or forever hold your piece". This episode's okay, and at least it's a breather from the heavy shit of the Xindi season followed by EVIL ALIEN NAZIS: HOLY FUCK WRAP THE TEMPORAL COLD WAR UP AS FAST AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.


Borderland: A gross and grody episode that, as I feared, is drowning me in continuity porn. Alright, so we've got these guys who bust in and kill a bunch of Klingons on their ship. Human supersoldiers or something like that. Who the hell are they? A bunch of Augments (as in, genetically augmented humans) who want to escape their exile planet and like, replace humanity or something? Oh, and they were holdover embryos of the Eugenics Wars from Star Trek's past. You may recognize those as the backstory of iconic Star Trek villain, Khan. To that end, these motherfuckers read as one giant retread of Star Trek 2 with the superior supermen escaping exile and Seeking Revenge. Jesus, I think I liked it better when they were being proud of having read Moby Dick. That ain't enough to be drowning, though. We then have Brent Spiner, playing a Dr. Soong. To cite some TNG lore, a Dr. Soong created some androids, including iconic TNG character, Data. I know all this shit. It doesn't mean I'm impressed. So, the actual plot. It's fucking dire too. Enterprise has to take Dr. Soong out with them as their prisoner in transit to get advice from him on how to stop the Augments, but they run into slaver aliens called the Orions (who are green people and also a returning 60's Star Trek species, I'm told) who capture a bunch of people and try to sell them. Gross. Holding up T'Pol like a piece of meat at a literal slave auction Jesus fucking Christ I'm going to barf. Oh, and the main slaver guard is The Big Show! The wrestler! T'Pol kicks him in the balls! WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON??? The Augments end up busting Soong out of the Enterprise and he goes off to make more of his Augments. Look, I'll talk more about the Augments and the weird ethical hoops later. This is a continuing story arc, so I get more of it. This is just horrific. I'm going to deal with it as fast as possible.

HE TASKS ME!!!

Cold Station 12: Okay so when you take out all the slavery stuff, this Augments arc becomes... just kind of generic. The whole deal with this one is Soong and the Augments heading to the titular Cold Station 12, which is a medical space station that has all the old embryos from the Eugenics Wars. Torture and Doing A Bad ensues. The most interesting thing on display here is the friction between Dr. Soong and Malik, the new leader of the Augments. Soong is an antagonist but he has a bit of a conscience, wanting to achieve his goals without killing anybody but determined enough to pull the trigger if it comes to it. Malik, on the other hand, is just a bloodthirsty superior superman who balks at Soong's pacifism and really wants to kill humans. He even lies about having killed his own brother to Soong, crying crocodile tears. It's pretty goddamned obvious, given the clash between Malik's bloodthirst and Soong's conscience, that Brent Spiner's going to get a knife in the back next episode. Oh, and we've got Phlox's pen pal in this episode! Yay! He gets beaten up and interrogated, and gets to watch a man melt due to infectious blood diseases! OH FUN! There's a lot more I could talk about, like Smike; the Augment who isn't super strong and thus was left on their planet by Malik and the others. He appeared to be the Star Trek empathy path towards redemption of the Augments, but then Malik shot him because ME SUPERIOR ME LIKE KILL. Oh, and our cliffhanger is Archer climbing a really tall ladder to stop space diseases from killing everyone. I'M STILL IN A DREAM, SNAKE EATER. Couldn't resist. Let's just call this what it is, a microcosm of all the shit pulling at the moral center of the show in the Xindi arc with a new sprinkle of continuity over it, and move on to the resolution.


The Augments: Or we could pull a classic Doctor Who and resolve our cliffhanger in like five minutes. Yeah, okay, Archer venting himself out into space and getting beamed back to Enterprise a second later is kind of cool, I guess. As for the rest of this? Not great. Not really. I called it a microcosm of the Xindi arc, but even that arc had a more redemptive ending than this shit. Malik wants to shoot all kinds of space diseases on a Klingon colony to spark a war between them and Earth so that the Augments can live in peace, and Dr. Soong wants... not to kill a bunch of people for no reason when they can find a nice planet and live quietly. We also get a Khan namedrop because of course we fucking do. Dr. Soong is also playing with the embryos to make them not be a bunch of violent bloodthirsty folks, and Malik objects to this. So, it's coup time! I'm honestly surprised Soong doesn't get shanked, but instead another Augment helps Soong escape back to Enterprise and she gets shanked by Malik for that. Yeah, we save the day and all, but all the Augments are killed and Malik gets a hole shot through him. This is disappointing. The Augments don't get a chance at redemption like I'd have liked, all the ones who could have been redeemed get killed for not wanting to murder hard enough, and the rest like Malik are one note megalomaniacs. At least Dr. Soong gets his redemption of sorts... and it's a predictable one where he decides to devote his time to cybernetics, even going so far as to say the work might take "a generation or two". Now, as unimpressed as I am by that predictable twist which I'm sure the show wanted me to flail my arms in geekish joy at, we at least have something happening here. A redemption, and a promise of utopian idealism that will pay off one day with a wonderful character in Data. Other than that? I didn't care much for this arc.


The Forge: Yeah, I can tell where they're cribbing from with this one in terms of what previous old Star Trek it echoes, but they actually picked good stories to echo this time. Plus, the way they changed it around makes things kind of satisfying and almost promises a cool utopian solution. So, the Earth Embassy on Vulcan got bombed and something like 40 people died, including longtime supporting character Admiral Forrest. I don't like making a character like that go out in such a manner just to make the audience (and Archer) care more about bringing the people who did it to justice. That's just me, though. The Vulcans suspect a group of Vulcan radicals called the Syrrannites, and there's evidence to suggest that a Syrranite lady called T'Pau (LOOK LOOK ANOTHER "AMOK TIME' REFERENCE OOOH I'M GONNA FUCKIN' CONCLUDE] did it. As it turns out, this isn't the case. We get a lot happening, but the bulk of things makes this episode feel like a remix of Star Trek 6. That movie had a grand conspiracy of murder and framing to prevent humanity and the Klingons from working together, out of fear of change. Here we have the same sort of thing, but with the Vulcans and the reluctance for them to treat humanity as anything but emotional babies. Yeah, turns out a guy from the Vulcan High Command did it. We find this out via Ambassador Soval, another supporting character who's basically embodied the whole "humanity isn't ready" clash this entire show's had from day one. He's actually grown and changed, and now sort of trusts humanity enough to want to find out who did this attack. He even does a mind meld on a comatose guard to learn who planted the bomb in the embassy. I trust I don't need to scream about how reactionary and bigoted Vulcans are again, but here it's at least the fucking point of the story that they're such a bunch of old shitlords who are afraid of change that they'd blow up a bunch of their own people. Meanwhile we get Archer and T'Pol running around in a dangerous Vulcan desert to find the Syrrannites. Oh, and we have Star Trek 3 references with the whole katra thing, and Archer has a dead Syrrannite's katra in his head right now. I mean, it actually kind of worked for me, this one. I rolled my eyes a bit, but I was engaged with the plot and am kind of excited to see where it goes from here. I have some high hopes, and we'll see if the show will fuck me on those hopes or not.


Awakening: It's the middle part of what is now, I guess, a three-parter about this Vulcan situation. A little less exciting than last time, but there are still some fun concepts. We have Archer with a Vulcan spirit in his head from last time, but it's not the Syrrannite leader; it's goddamned Surak. Basically Vulcan Jesus, in that he's the central figure of their faith in logic and whatnot. So having Archer have visions of him is... certainly something. Ah yes, and then there's the High Command, which I expected to be the ones behind the Earth Embassy bombing and also blaming it on the Syrrannites to both keep humans at arm's length from Vulcan and consolidate their control of the planet. I was just a bit off as they don't seem to all be behind it. There is their leader, though. V'Las is hell bent on both blowing the everloving fuck out of the Syrrannites, and making sure that Enterprise fucks off so that they don't see him do it? As Soval explains, he's also plotting a massive attack on the Andorians despite their whole peace treaty. Oh, so we have another antagonist who feels absolutely valid in his need and desire to just murder people wholesale. Bit of a retread of Malik from the last fucking arc, but it works better here because he's an old privileged Vulcan and not a pissy revolutionary. The inner Doctor Who fan in me was screaming for the High Command to be corrupt old fuckers who get torn down based on the last episode, but you know what? I'll settle for just putting V'Las down a peg, if it means material social progress for Vulcan. Oh yeah, and they kill T'Pol's mom off. Not a good move. Can we have an episode where you don't kill someone to try and make me care? We're going to Andoria next episode, don't you dare kill off my boy Shran. I should also mention Archer's finding of some sacred ancient Vulcan relic of Surak, the name of which escapes me. It's the name of the next episode as well, so let's call this an in-flux transition piece and see how they resolve all of this.

Enlightenment.

Kir'Shara: Oh, this was a pretty satisfying conclusion in a lot of ways. Archer, T'Pau, and T'Pol running through the desert with the titular Kir'Shara is alright enough, but we also have Tucker and Soval heading to meet up with our good old pal Shran to warn him that the Vulcans are going to attack Andoria. To which Shran promptly kidnaps and tortures Soval because he doesn't believe him. Yuck. Shit really ramps up, though, and you can tell what kind of antagonist V'Las is supposed to be; absolutely believing he's in the moral right while also being an old privileged fuckhead using his power to further his own goals. The ending, with Archer revealing the Kir'Shara to the High Command (and the involvement of V'Las in the whole embassy bombing thing) while V'Las desperately tries to destroy it? Lovely. He gets deposed, the Vulcans gain a bit more of their history and a little more enlightenment, and we have a real sense of material social progress. With the new change comes less of the Vulcans treating humanity like they're not ready. This is immensely satisfying stuff, and payoff for four seasons of investment in this show. We've finally hit a turning point. We're finally ready. Things are soured a bit more by the big shocking twist ending where it turns out V'Las was working with, of all people, a Romulan. I liked him much better as a villain acting in full selfish xenophobia, rather than actually plotting against his own kind like that. It cheapens him in retrospect a bit, but look; after the last hot mess of a three parter? I'll gladly take this set of three as a working functional piece of good Star Trek. Thank goodness for that. Can we keep it up?


Daedalus: This has a lot of nice little touches to it, even though it ends a little more grim and tragic than I was expecting. We have Emory Ericson, inventor of the transporter, on board to do some tests with super-long range transporter beaming that could beam you literal light years away. As that shit don't exist in any of the later Star Trek eras, we can assume something goes wrong here. Which it basically does. This is all a subterfuge from Emory and his reluctant daughter Danica, as it turns out they're out here to beam back Emory's son Quinn who got lost in a transport test but is still like, some sort of subspace distortion ghost that fucks things up if it touches you. There's a personal connection between Archer and the Ericsons, and he's none too pleased to learn about the lying but still wants to help them anyway. This leads to a bit of my favorite moral dilemma, idealism vs. practicality. Archer wants to help and save Quinn, while Trip and T'Pol are the more practical types saying "Emory lied to us and we can't trust him, plus a crewman died from this subspace fuckery, so we should turn around and fuck off". You know what side I fall on, and I guess the episode wants us to help too. Turns out they can't save Quinn, but we do get to beam him back so Emory gets to see his son one last time and let go finally. Tragic, but emotionally stirring. There's something else that happens in this episode that had me jumping for fucking joy. I didn't point it out, but in the previous episode? Yeah, turns out the Syrrannites had the fucking cure for Pa'Nar Syndrome. Y'all remember Pa'Nar Syndrome? The Vulcan Space AIDS T'Pol contracted, which the Vulcans were super fucking bigoted about and I screamed about it nonstop? Well, not only is T'Pol just cured of it now, but according to Phlox? The whole material social progress of the Kir'Shara thing has people on Vulcan coming forward about their affliction, being cured, and the bigoted stigma starting to fade away. OH THANK GOD! OH THANK FUCKING GOD! YES! YES CHANGE THAT HORRIBLE SHIT! Oh, "Daedalus", I never thought one throwaway line could fill me with such incredible joy!! I also think this is the end of the T'Pol/Tucker romance subplot? Like, they seem to come to a mature conclusion and still remain pals? (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: HAHA NO)Yeah, based on all that? I can give this one a pass.


Observer Effect: It's a clever enough idea on paper, but I don't know if it really works as intended. What we have here is what I'll call a reverse Prime Directive story. It's reverse in that there are a pair of these non-corporeal aliens possessing members of the crew (most often being Reed and Mayweather, though they bounce around here and there over the episode) who are here strictly to observe how species with physical form react when they bungle into exposure of a virus on a nearby planet. Their whole ethical policy of non-interference is all about how "intelligent" these species are in solving the crisis of the virus, and they just watch the situation play out and make impartial comments about how other species did this or that. It's a goddamn Prime Directive story, but the Enterprise crew is the "primitive" culture that these fuckers have the full power to save from the crisis facing them, but refuse to do because That Would Be Interfering And Interfering Is A Bad, Gotta Let Them Die Because It's The Rules. Clever idea and all, I'll grant, but it still doesn't save the episode from falling into the same trap as a regular Prime Directive episode: the possessed Mayweather spends 40 minutes hemming and hawing about how they really should help out this time because humanity is doing shit differently than other species, and then the last 5 minutes are that alien host just slamming the "fuck it" button and fixing everything anyway. Archer gets a wild scene at the end where he confronts them over not giving a fuck and having no compassion or empathy for helping them out of a situation that was an accident, and OOPS IT'S ACCIDENTALLY A CONDEMNATION OF THIS WHOLE PRIME DIRECTIVE SHIT. I find it hilarious but I can't say if it's intentional or not. Got a giggle out of me though, we'll give the episode that. At least putting the onus of non-interference on some aliens doesn't make me as mad 'cause it's not our leads we're making morally bankrupt. So, you know, it's fine. Not the greatest but not bad either.

(Continued in 4.2)