To Boldly Step Forward (Enterprise Season 4) [4.2]

(Continued from 4.1) 


Babel One: Can't say I was the biggest fan of this one. It felt like it dragged on a bit, and its plot feels a little derivative. It's another "a mysterious third party is working to keep two opposing factions from hashing out an alliance" story, like Star Trek 6 or, even in part, the whole Vulcan three-parter we just had a while ago. This time it's the Andorians and the Tellarites, the Tellarites being these pig-looking guys. Them showing up and the titular Babel make this some sort of callback to a TOS episode called "Journey To Babel" which was also about peace conferences and third parties working to throw a wrench in things. That one had... a bit more going on under the hood in places, but I'm not writing a Boldly Go about TOS so let's leave things there. Well, what do we have? Romulans are behind it all. In fact I think it's that same guy who showed up at the end of "Kir'Shara" and was behind all of that. They've got this ship that can disguise itself as other ships to make it look like Andorians and Tellarites are being fucked up by the opposing faction, and said ship blew the shit out of our old pal Shran's ship. He and others made it out, though, but they're not too happy about being on the same ship with Tellarites. You know how this frenemy shit works by now, Shran's not exactly on our side and he does do a bad of nearly killing the Tellarites, but Archer talks him down all rational like. Unfortunately Trip and Reed are stuck on the Romulan ship, which the twist ending shows isn't even manned. The Romulans are controlling it with future VR or some shit. Cute twist, but this is very much a flavor I've already had on this show. We'll see what the rest of it does before I condemn it, but I can't say it has my full attention.

Peace.

United: Hey, it's got jolly co-operation and utopian optimism baked into the concept and title! It's very close to working, but there's one thing they do to fill the time that challenges it in a way that made me roll my eyes. In fact, why don't we get on to that, as the interesting things are said quickly enough? We have Archer continuing to try to get the Andorians and the Tellarites to stop bitching and work together against the common threat of this mystery marauder, with a fun little line about how now they have to acquiesce to human politeness and bury the hatchet. Given the whole plot of species working together, and the title, it's fairly easy to see that the show's finally planting the first seeds of what will become the United Federation Of Planets. It's honestly a story I thought the show would be telling earlier, and one where I assumed the Vulcans would be on humanity's asses about it, but the show's surprised me by moving past that. It's a story that jumps out as the most obvious one worth telling if you're bothering to make a Star Trek prequel series, and the seeds that are planted here are planted well. Our B plot, with Trip and Reed on the Romulan marauder trying to do a hack to sabotage it while surviving the Romulans fucking around with it remotely and trying to kill them, works well enough. Where's the problem? Oh, the middle of the episode. Shran's girlfriend got shot in the end of the last episode, and... well, she dies in this one! We got ourselves a good old-fashioned fridging to make Shran really mad and demand BLOOD VENGEANCE for his dead beloved in the form of a duel to the death with the Tellarite who shot her. Archer, knowing that if either of them kill the other, the shaky alliance between them formed to track down the marauder will crumble, takes the place of the challenger. So, it's a duel to the death between Archer and Shran, and Andorian honor plus human determination won't let either of them back down. However, Hoshi and Travis find a clever loophole out of it and all Archer has to do is cut off one of Shran's antennae to prove he wins. Yeah, okay. I can give them a nod for being clever to get out of killing off Shran but also still respect his Andorian honor or whatever. I've seen this shit before, though. I know that TOS did it once with the end of "Amok Time", and I'd bet money on them pulling the same sort of trick a few more times as well. That's something like the fifth time I've mentioned "Amok Time" in this season writeup. I swear to God. As a kid, Manny Coto's only physical Star Trek media must have been an old VHS tape with "Amok Time" and "Journey To Babel" on it, as well as a taping of Star Trek 2. Other than that eye-rolling same old same old, this isn't bad. Oh, and it ends with the reveal that the dude hooked up to Romulan VR and controlling their marauder is... an Andorian. Uhh. Okay?


The Aenar: Okay so that's actually kind of important for the resolution. The dude the Romulans have hooked up isn't any old Andorian, but an Aenar: white-skinned telepaths who are super pacifists. So we get a whole episode of Archer and Shran on the ice caves of Andoria, trying to make contact with the other Aenars to figure out what to do. That leads to the sister of the guy the Romulans captured coming with them and hooking herself up to a copy of the weird VR machine thing so she can get through to him and tell him to cut it out. The power of love saves the day, even if the Aenar guy dies at the end and it's tragic. At least they both didn't die. I'm fairly sure this is going to be the swan song of Shran, considering that we're two and a half Blu-Rays from the end and he makes a point of saying it'll be a while before we see him again. Time will tell on that. Really, this would have been fine, but there's another niggling little plot point that's rearing up again; Trip not being over T'Pol. This is the second time the show's diddled me on this, as when they actually had sex they discussed it in a mature matter that suggested they were both being adults about it and remaining professional, only for the shit to come up again anyway. SAME THING. "Daedalus" would have been a fine enough cap on it, but now we have Trip's concern for T'Pol as she tests the whole VR thing causing him to make errors in judgement, and he's requesting a transfer at the end of the episode because he can't remain professional any more. Oh for fuck's sakes. Now I have to deal with this shit for another two, possibly three episodes? I don't like the prospect of that and I very well could grumble. Other than that, this is like okay. Fine. Let's rip this band-aid off and deal with Mr. Unrequited Love over here...


Affliction: Alright. Deep breaths here. I'm very... divided on this episode. On the one hand, it's pretty well-plotted and has this real sense of tension to it by splitting up almost half of the Enterprise "family" at this point in various ways. On the other? This is pure continuity porn. Sheer fanwank to the nth degree to justify answering a question nobody asked. Actually, I take that back. They had a way better answer for it, and it was a fucking lampshade gag line. Okay. So the main thrust of this episode is Phlox getting kidnapped and taken to a bunch of Klingons (led by a Klingon played by James Avery, best known as either Uncle Phil in Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or the voice of Shredder in the 80's Ninja Turtles cartoon. No matter how I feel about the plot, this is cool casting.) who want him to treat a virus threatening the Klingons. Meanwhile, Trip has officially transferred to NX-02 Columbia and is doing his best to fit in, but he and T'Pol can communicate in dreamspace or some shit? Oh, and Malcolm is forced to keep secrets from Archer thanks to his prior involvement with Star Trek's version of the CIA (which, I'm not sure of, but might be a reference to some black ops shit in later Star Trek called Section 31. I don't fully get the continuity reference here so I could be wrong), and that gets him locked up for insubordination. Add a crisis involving Klingons hacking the warp core or whatever, and we have what should be a tense episode. Then the continuity comes in. Okay. Okay. So. IN 60'S STAR TREK, the Klingons were just regular looking dudes in brownface. It was the 60's, it wasn't great, then the Star Trek movies come in and change the design to give them the forehead ridges that became iconic. The Klingons of Enterprise still have them, despite being set before TOS and its weird "just guys" Klingons. Visual inconsistency, oh no! Whatever's a continuity obsessed nerd to do? Well, there's the route of the Deep Space Nine episode where they literally go back in time into the TOS episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" (which, as an aside, is one of the most hilarious fucking things I've ever seen Star Trek do and a highlight of TOS for me, personally) and Worf has a bit of lampshading regarding this where he just says "yeah we don't talk about that shit". Funny little throwaway line to acknowledge the inconsistency and poke fun at it! Okay, fine! Apparently that wasn't enough to help Michael Sussman and Manny Coto sleep at night, so... here's an explanation for you! The Klingons harvested leftover Augment embryos destroyed at the end of "The Augments" in order to try and create Klingon Augments of their own, and these Klingon Augments don't have forehead bumps because of genetics or whatever! There you go! NOW we can breathe easy, knowing this 40 year old plot hole has been filled in! Oh, thank God! Our restless nerdy completionist souls can finally know peace! This is fucking stupid. It's a decent episode that could have done without all this jerking off, and it's not even fucking done yet. Roll the next one.


Divergence: I got all my ill will out of the way, and I have to admit that this one has some things going for it. Mainly the opening, which is this really cool bit where Trip does a space shimmy from Columbia to Enterprise while both ships are at warp 5 and flying opposite one another. There's other fun stuff too, like the Klingon doctor working with Phlox. I've made my position on Klingons well clear by now, but this guy's a physician and thus willing to fuck over James Avery's Klingon general by helping Phlox only cure the virus instead of perfecting Klingon Augments. His logic being that him dying to save millions would be an honorable way to go out. Yeah, that's a hell of a lot better than most Klingon portrayals on this show. We got that Reed plotline as well where his association with the mysterious black ops dude, Harris, gets revealed and he eventually sides with the Enterprise family. Other than that, I don't know. I did all my yelling about how goddamn dumb the idea of this was, and it's close to working. All they had to do was resist the temptation to make it about the precious forehead bumps plot hole and it'd stand on its own two feet and not feel like quitesuch a mess. Oh, and Trip is staying around to help repair things. But he's not officially back yet. Methinks we'll be dealing with that at a later date. Oh god. We only delayed the unrequited love shit with this fanwankery, didn't we?. Oh no. OH NO! MANNY! MANNY! EXPLAIN STARDATING! GO INTO THE LORE OF THAT SHIP THAT CRASHED AND ACCIDENTALLY MADE A GANGSTER PLANET! FUCK! ANYTHING! ANYTHING BUT THIS! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Someone thought this shot was essential enough to put on the
back of the Blu-Ray box set. HEH HEH ME LIKEYYYY

Bound: WELL THAT'LL TEACH ME TO OPEN MY BIG FUCKING MOUTH!!! I get a different flavor of yelling, at least. This episode is dire, juvenile drivel. I actually felt some secondhand shame watching it. Enterprise (and I guess Star Trek in general, come to think of it) has had an interesting sort of tug-of-war between being an enlightened utopia where we're all a little more mature about sex and sexuality, and being a show written by plenty of heterosexual men aimed at that same sort of audience, while also aimed on primetime network television. So. The Orions are back. We meet an Orion space pirate who wants to cut a deal with Enterprise, and he has them accept his gift of three Orion slave women. Every man on board proceeds to basically become a bunch of fucking horndogs who can't do their jobs because AH HUH HUH HUH ME LIKE THE HOT GREEN WOMAN, SHE MAKES MY PEEPEE BECOME THE BIG PEEPEE. There's a reason for that which goes beyond just the crew being horny. Orion women give off ALIEN MIND CONTROL SEX PHEROMONES that make every man horny for them, super aggressive because ME STRONG MAN WHO TAKE WHAT HE WANT, and also want to do exactly what the Orion women say. Women just get headaches and remain mostly rational but stressed out, and T'Pol is immune by being a Vulcan. What's interesting, I guess, is that Trip is also immune because when he and T'Pol did it last season, they created a Vulcan psychic bond? Okay??? That's weird but it's in service of something pretty standard for this sort of alien mind control plot; you've got two people immune while everyone else is acting out of character. We've done that before. We also have Archer doing the deed with one of the Orion women, and if this doesn't smack of "WELL CAPTAIN KIRK DID IT WHEN I WAS A KID SO OUR GUY'S GOTTA HAVE SEX WITH THE GREEN LADY TOO" then I don't know what does. Turns out Orion is a matriarchal society and these women are actually in full control of their nefarious plot to capture Archer 'cause he defied Orion back in "Borderland". I'll admit that the idea of Orion society being ruled by their women like this is interesting and worth exploring. But... ALIEN MIND CONTROL SEX PHEROMONES?? REALLY? At least Trip is back and T'Pol gave him a kiss on the mouth. The monkey's paw curled on me. I didn't want the love angle to be all awkward, and instead everything around it was juvenile and awkward. No. Actually, no. I'm not falling for it a third fucking time. I don't buy that this is the end of them needling us with T'Pol and Tucker. It's too neat and mature. They're gonna throw a wrench in it again. I don't trust like that. This was dire, embarrassing bullshit to watch and if I wanted a boner I wouldn't be watching fucking Star Trek now would I?


In A Mirror, Darkly, Part I: Well, that's... different. The nature of the Blu-Ray listing the episode names, plus me knowing shit about Star Trek, basically gave the game away early on. Still, I have to pour one out for the goddamn shocker of the cold open repeating the ending of Star Trek First Contact, except Zefram Cochrane blows the fuck out of the Vulcans making first contact. WE'RE DEALING WITH MIRROR WORLD, MOTHERFUCKERS!!! Mirror World is my term for it, anyway. It's an alternate universe that showed up in 60's Trek in the iconic episode "Mirror, Mirror" where there's a Terran Empire and everyone's an imperialist violent sadist asshole. I've seen that one. It's good. I also saw the Deep Space Nine episode that went back into Mirror World and that's pretty good too. This? I don't know. I think I've hit maximum bloody fanwank with this show.. We're just smashing two old 60's episodes together at this point. The first is "Mirror, Mirror", of course, but the second is "The Tholian Web", an episode which I actually haven't seen before. This gives me, for once, an actually interesting perspective of not understanding the continuity reference, but all that gives me are the main setpieces. The show goes all out though, making a mirror world title sequence that shows weaponry over the ages instead of exploration. Fuckin' wild. Captain Forrest is in command of the mirror Enterprise, but his first officer, Archer, wants to blow the fuck out of Tholians instead so he starts a mutiny to get what he wants. Yeah, that's consistent with Mirror World rules from 60's Trek; kill your way to the top. I mean... at least the actors are getting to have fun playing a bunch of mean assholes? John Billingsley in particular is enjoying being an unethical doctor who dissects animals and gets to torture things. Including Tholians. I gotta say, the Tholians are cool as fuck. Crystalline lava insects or something. Impressive... but then, they didn't come up with them, did they? No. Thanks to Mirror Archer's bungling about, the Mirror Enterprise manages to find a dimensional time/space warp that the Tholians opened up, warping them just in range of a Federation starship from the "Prime" Star Trek universe. Yes, Federation. It's the USS Defiant, an actual NCC class goddamned 60's Trek starship. This is why I mention the episode "The Tholian Web" because I'm pretty sure that the Mirror World Enterprise crew has literally jumped into a retelling of it. Complete with a handful of them beaming aboard and it's literally an empty 60's Star Trek ship with dead bodies in the 60's uniforms and the 60's bridge and I CAN'T. I JUST... I JUST FUCKING CAN'T ANYMORE. This is it. This is the final fucking excess. This is not the worst episode of Enterprise, not by a long shot. I'm sure I could think of ten more that pissed me off if you gave me a minute. However. I think I have found the moment where Enterprise, at long last, finally and personally broke for me under this excess. This fannish reconstruction of the old nostalgic iconography is neat to see, I guess, and must have been a real labor of love for everyone involved. To say nothing of how longtime 60's Trek fans must have flipped their shit on airing. I am not one of those people. I'm sharing my perspective, and here's my perspective; It's very pretty but it just does nothing for me. Even the destruction of Mirror Enterprise in a Tholian Web should be shocking, but it's not. I have officially run out of fucks to give. Whoever the hell is in charge of this show appears to not give a shit about anything besides rote recreation of one specific nostalgic iteration of this show. This is not boldly going. This is boldly retreading. No wonder Star Trek, from the Abrams films to Discovery, can't get the fuck over the Captain Kirk years and their adjacents. They couldn't even do it back in 2005. I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed.

A horrible dystopian alternate reality of endless reference porn.

In A Mirror, Darkly, Part II: Okay, so it does lift a lot of burden from the last part by being more of an original story, I guess. It still very much suffers the same fatigue of most parallel universe stories, where These Aren't The Guys We Know And Love. We've also got half the crew wearing the old 60's uniforms now. You know, maybe it's the thing of gin I mixed up to watch this episode with to get me through it, but I'm starting to get terribly clever about this whole thing. This absolutely was not intended, since all these sweet kisses to the past are meant out of love... but there's a parallel here. The unstoppable tyrannical might of the Terran Empire and our Mirror Crew, paired with the death nostalgia drive keeping Star Trek permanently shackled to 1967. You really could make something out of it. Consider Mirror Archer, driven by his ambition. I made a lot about the back and forth between the grimdark last season, and this is kind of the Archer we would have gotten had we delved fully into the dark. It also feels, believe it or not, like an echo of the Temporal Cold War. A ship from the future that Archer now holds, and demands to hold in order to gain more power and rule. The most interesting thing this does textually is a brief tense sort of "bug hunt" where there's an alien lizard man on board Defiant picking people off. Yes, it's a Gorn. Another reference. I can't be mad at that because here's another far more transparent whap to the face in the name of nostalgia. MIRROR SOVAL HAS A GOATEE. BECAUSE SPOCK HAD A FUCKING GOATEE IN "MIRROR, MIRROR". I SWEAR TO GOD. It is neat to see that, as in "Mirror, Mirror" though, the Vulcan way of logic pulls through and Soval and T'Pol turn on Archer in the end. They don't succeed, but they do. Archer's grim end, of course, is that he let his guard down. Kill your way to the top, Archer... and Hoshi, now Empress Sato, does just that. Oh, and this just ends. It just ends on that. There wasn't even any interaction with the prime universe, aside from YEAH BABEY WE GOT US A 60'S STAR TREK STARSHIP. I'm sure many Star Trek fans adored this one, but I'm not one of them. At the end of the day we still have the same problem I had with "Affliction" and "Divergence"; we spent 90 minutes dancing around to answer a question nobody asked for the sake of nostalgia. No wonder we're three episodes away from the end of televised Star Trek's longest airing streak. The death nostalgia drive had to end, for its own good. We'll see if the final three can do anything really genius...


Demons: I don't know if I'd call it "genius", but you know what? It's playing with something I can get behind. This is, in effect, a story about the first flourishing sprouts of what will become the Federation. Which I swear has been the driving force behind both the Vulcan three-parter and he Andorian/Tellarite three-parter, but here it really does feel meaningful. Indeed, we have the forming of the Coalition of Planets, which I guess is pretty much the prototype for all that. We also have shady and shadowy opposition to that with our antagonists this time, Terra Prime. Who are they? Oh, they're xenophobic nationalists who want Earth for humanity and for all the aliens to get the fuck off the planet. It's real uncomfy talk to hear as these guys preach, and it's not hard to spot the parallels between this space supremacy movement and other actual supremacy movements. Usually I'd be sour at including such bigoted opinions in my Star Trek, but it's firmly on the side of the protagonists this time. Plus it's part of a story that is, in its own way, worth telling. This is, I'm hoping, the story of how we got to the utopian idealism of future Star Trek, and how we faced the challenges of those who were willing to threaten lives to make sure that utopia never came to pass, out of xenophobia and fear. Yeah, Terra Prime basically has a Death Star laser beam they threaten Earth with if every alien on the planet doesn't peace out. Also Peter Weller's the leader of Terra Prime! Huh. Before I peace out, we should mention the subplots. For whatever reason, Terra Prime has a human/Vulcan hybrid baby who's the daughter of Trip and T'Pol. I have no idea how this kid came to be or why these supremacists have or want her, but... it's happening and I'll tell you when I know. There's also a subplot involving an old flame of Travis's who, uh, may or may not be a sneaky Terra Prime lady. Probably so? This has my attention at least. I'll save the rest for the resolution. Two to go...


Terra Prime: We got there in the end, but at a cost I'm none too happy about. It's a pretty good episode about fighting back against Terra Prime, but I'm not sure what to say on it beyond the plot summary. I guess I should try, though. We do have a covert mission down to Mars to get Tucker and T'Pol out as well as stop Terra Prime from lasering the shit out of Starfleet HQ, and while we go down and do that Hoshi is actually in charge. Here and now, in the penultimate episode, there really is a sense of how much growth we've had. Like the song says, it has been a long road gettin' from there to here. Hoshi, who was once so spooked by the cosmic horror of space, now confident enough to take temporary command. In many ways Hoshi is the heart and soul of the utopian future, her whole skillset being communication. I said that when we started, and it's shown through. Tucker gets to be clever and do some Doctor Who like hacking, Reed shoots shit and proves he's a competent agent, and Archer... well, Archer always was following his father's legacy, as Peter Weller says in their confrontation. Using his father's dream to explore the stars, seek out new life, you know the rest of the quote. The day is saved, pretty early, but there is a cost of course. Tucker and T'Pol's baby (who was a clone that Terra Prime created to, I guess demonstrate that oh no humans will be eradicated by interspecies breeding) doesn't make it. Wow. Jesus. I know this show likes the reset button and all, but there's one episode left. You didn't have to kill the kid. I mean, fuck. Archer's final speech to the Coalition of Planets is easily one of the most uplifting things ever, though. What a fine way to (almost) go out. Ending with the forming of what will become the Federation is quite nice. Of course, there is one more episode left. Strap in one last time, y'all. It's time to finish this show.

"Engage". "Deanna that's Picard, not Archer." "Oops."

These Are The Voyages...: Well, I uh... I can't say I was expecting that. This is, for all intents and purposes, a coda. Jumping ahead six years to the finale of Enterprise Season 10 in some distant reality, we get the final adventure of the NX-01 crew before she's decommissioned. It's a simple enough one, helping our pal Shran save his daughter from some thugs, but it does end up leading to the brave sacrifice of one Commander Charles Tucker. Yeah, I can't say I'm a fan of killing him off right at the end here. Y'all know how I feel about that sort of shit. There's also, of course, Archer's big speech to what will become the Federation that he needs to prepare for. We're finally at the point where things become a reality, everything's set... but there's just one little thing I haven't told you. One figure watching right along with us. None other than Will Riker, First Officer of the Enterprise-D. This whole final story is a holodeck retelling on his Enterprise, and here he is lurking in the margins of the background, even playing the role of chef and talking things out with our crew to learn more about them. Oh my god. You might think, given how hard I bounced off of "In A Mirror, Darkly", that I would decry this as more fanwank, only for TNG instead of TOS. I'm not. There's an emotional core to this final episode, whereas "Mirror, Darkly", for me, was just a 90 minute fanfiction about some fascists who look like our Enterprise crew. To me this serves a purpose, and the purpose it serves touches me in ways I can only try my best to describe. Riker, you see, is troubled by some stuff from his past that's come up, and so Counselor Deanna Troi has suggested he check out the holodeck tapes of NX-01's last hurrah to clear his head and figure out what to do. Now, the one strike that could be made against this is that it is also, like the mirror one, Going Back Into An Old Star Trek Episode. In this case it's a late TNG episode that I never saw called "The Pegasus", which means my guide thought it was emotionally flawed in some way. I don't mind it as much here because, again, it's doing something. Do you see what this shit is doing? The utopian idealism of TNG is what got me seriously invested in this Star Trek stuff to begin with, barring the few movies I saw with Captain Kirk and pals. It's a show that made me feel like a better individual for having seen it, one I'll carry with me forever... and here is a man from that show, looking back on this one for the same emotional guidance to carry with him. Star Trek is gaining inspiration from itself, reflecting on itself as it prepares to leave television after 18 years. I think it's beautiful. I think it's a marvelous way to go out, killing Tucker aside. I can imagine all the adventures Archer and pals had in those six years between, all the exploration they did, the worthwhile times they had and hardships they suffered. Commander Riker can play with them all on the holodeck, and gain equal inspiration. We've come full circle, and we've come to the end of Enterprise. There's a beautiful bit I'll link below, where we get the whole "Space, the final frontier" thing narrated by Picard, before moving to Kirk... and then letting Archer finish the final part. As NX-01 sails into the second nebula on the right, straight on until morning, we at last have earned the right to say it. Four years, four seasons, and we're no longer stepping forward. Time to let Star Trek fade away, ignoring the shackles of the past that are yet to come. Let's just have this moment. Let's just say it. Captain Archer and pals, in forming the Federation and helping to kickstart this utopia... will boldly go where no one has gone before.

To be concluded...