Archer, Malcolm, and Hoshi return from a visit to a pre-Warp planet, feeling confident that their exploration was successful and interesting. All is well... until they inventory their equipment, and realize that the unthinkable has happened. Malcolm left his communicator on the planet's surface.
Scans lead them to a tavern they had visited. But instead of recovering the communicator, they arouse the suspicion of some local soldiers who are gearing up for a potential war. They are taken prisoner, making a bad situation worse as their captors obtain not only more communicators, but also a scanner and their phase pistols!
As Archer and Malcolm try to remain stoic, avoiding letting their captors know exactly who they are or where they come from, Trip and T'Pol prepare a rescue mission in a most unlikely vessel...
CHARACTERS
Capt. Archer: Has absorbed T'Pol's lectures on "cultural contamination" to the point that he is right on the cusp of the Prime Directive. He acknowledges that he could probably get himself and Malcolm out of their predicament by simply telling the truth, and he even considers doing so. In the end, though, he realizes that this culture is not ready for contact with aliens - or the technological leaps that would stem from that - and is willing to remain silent, even when doing so may mean the deaths of both himself and Malcolm. I'm not sure that early Season One Archer would have done the same, which indicates a certain degree of character growth.
Reed: We see his reaction to having made such a disastrous error. First, he goes into denial, desperately searching the decontamination chamber. When it becomes apparent that it is on the planet, he switches to martyr mode, stating that he is ready for any punishment Archer chooses to assign. When captured by General Gosis, Reed plays along with Archer's bluff, coming up with an excuse for their physiological differences that plays right into the military's paranoia about their enemies. For all that, faced with the reality of execution, his mounting fear is highly visible even as he attempts to disguise it. An excellent performance by Dominick Keating throughout.
Trip: Has apparently been tinkering with the Suliban cell ship on and off for a long time, trying to figure out its various systems. Conveniently, he now comprehends almost all of the systems on the ship. With Archer and Malcolm held captive, and facing the need to avoid any further cultural contamination, Trip works overtime to figure out the final, key system - the cloaking device. This subplot would have worked a lot better if we had seen Trip occasionally working on the cell ship in previous episodes. As it stands, it comes across as a little too convenient - something that could have easily been avoided, simply by inserting a couple of scenes into previous episode. The likes of Marauders and A Night in Sickbay surely had room for a quick "Trip works on Suliban ship" scene, to pave the way for its importance here.
THOUGHTS
I've been waiting for this episode pretty much since the series' pilot: The episode in which Archer's Crew Screws Up. I had been hoping that the inevitable "screw up" would be precipitated by Archer's headstrong nature, but this works too. A minor little accident - losing a tiny piece of technology. The sort of thing that could happen to anybody. But in a pre-Warp civilization, one that's on the brink of war at that, such a tiny little accident is all that's needed to sow the seeds of disaster.
I would have liked it better if the Enterprise crew had not been so easily able to retrieve all the lost equipment. Honestly, it challenged my suspension of disbelief that the captured equipment would remain housed with the prisoners. Surely any reasonable military would send it to a more secure, research-based facility, rather than keep it in a prison. The episode wins points back for the ending scene between Archer and T'Pol, though. It's a thoughtful and well-acted scene, as both characters acknowledge that even with the recovery, their intervention likely did considerable damage, almost certainly tipping the scales of the brewing war by making the military even more paranoid about the capabilities of "The Alliance."
The episode moves at a good, fast pace, and there actually is a fair sense of jeopardy for Archer and Malcolm. Even though we know that both will survive, the episode does its job in making the viewer feel that they are actually in danger - an area in which too many Enterprise episodes have failed. Therefore, despite a few too-convenient plot issues, I'll still give this episode a solid...
Rating: 7/10.
Previous Episode: The Seventh
Next Episode: Singularity
Search Amazon.com for Star Trek: Enterprise
Review Index
No comments:
Post a Comment