Broken Bow Parts I and II (ENT)

Surprise! You're not getting another Original Series review today, you're getting Enterprise. This space will alternate between TOS and ENT, even as it alternates with DS9 for a pattern like this:

TOS - DS9 - ENT - DS9 - TOS - DS9 - ENT - etc.

Enterprise is the newest and least-loved addition to the Star Trek franchise. I was a detractor at the time that it came out. My biggest objection was that it just didn't feel like Star Trek. Great efforts were made to make it cool and hip and to make it draw in a non-Trekkie audience. Those efforts failed, by and large, while simultaneously succeeding in alienating loyal Trekkies, leading to the first Star Trek series since the original to be cancelled before completing a seven-year run.

Well, like most shows, I've come to appreciate Enterprise more with a little perspective. I still think there were things in the show that were very much mishandled and blatant pandering. Most of them involve decon gel.  But it also had a certain swashbuckling flare that I don't think any other show does as well.  And in and amongst its run are great arcs and great Star Trek plots.

Whether I wanted Star Trek to have a new baby brother or not, the baby arrived. And now it's part of the family. And not only do I have to accept that, but hopefully I can even learn to love it too.

"Broken Bow" was an extremely ambitious pilot. Which is a nice way of saying it's kind of a mess. In the space of two hours the pilot has to reintroduce us to the world of Star Trek, at a time period we've never seen before, give us the sense of the politics, introduce us to the whole cast, introduce the series' recurring villains, give us an incredibly complicated plot, take us to four different planets, and set the show up at the end. Oh and Klingons also.

"Emissary" and "Caretaker" were busy pilots too, and both had an awful lot to do. But "Broken Bow" just feels denser. Maybe because it refuses to focus closely on one character, giving us plenty of Captain Jonathan Archer, but also a lot of T'Pol, Charles "Trip" Tucker III, and a weird amount of backstory and focus on Hoshi Sato and Dr. Phlox. Only Malcolm Reed and Travis Mayweather really take the back seat on this pilot.

Enterprise takes us back earlier in Star Trek's future than we've ever really seen before. (Not counting the DS9 episode "Past Tense," and possibly some other miscellaneous forays.) It's only the 22nd Century, and humanity's first contact with Vulcan is still a vivid memory. A small handful of Vulcan's are living on earth, overseeing and advising Earth's burgeoning warp flight program. They've even brought a few other aliens to Earth like the Denobulan Dr. Phlox.

"Broken Bow" begins when an uninvited alien turns up on Earth, a Klingon who immediately gets shot by a human farmer. He's being chased by a pair of Suliban, genetically-enhanced reptilian baddies employed by the future.

Last week I said DS9 was the only pilot that started with a flashback to the Captain's past, which just shows how poorly I remembered "Broken Bow." Interspersed with this busy pilot are scenes between the Captain and his father, a starship engineer who the Vulcans held back from ever seeing his engine take flight.  This has filled Archer with a resentment of Vulcans that he seems to share with most of the human race, and this conflict pushes us through the episode.

On his mission to return the stricken Klingon to Q'onos, Archer's forced to take a Vulcan on board as his executive officer. T'Pol doesn't like him and isn't shy about expressing it, in that way Vulcans have of using logic as an excuse for being rude.

Trip, Archer, and T'Pol are very obviously meant to be McCoy, Kirk, and Spock here, and I'm OK with that, mostly because Trip sells country and cantankerous as well as DeForrest Kelley but adds a boyish charm and T'Pol sells Vulcan almost as well as Leonard Nimoy (well, as well as can be expected) but adds a confrontational edge Nimoy never had.

T'Pol has the Seven of Nine problem of being a really poor choice of sex symbol, costumed in a catsuit but written as a necessarily non-sexual character. Vulcans go into heat every 7 years; the rest of the time their sexuality is as repressed as their emotions. Jolene Blalock really can act, so I don't question the casting, but there is a sense that costuming and promotion on this show were being driven by different factors than the writing.

The rest of the cast is competent and promising here with what little they're given. Hoshi Sato brings back the long-lost post of communications specialist with a kind of cute nerdiness that makes sense for a linguist. She's not quite at ease on a spaceship, but she's unparallelled in her element. Travis Mayweather, the space boomer pilot, is sort of retro-sci-fi in his youth and profession, but his background hints of fleshing out this chunk of Trek history. Phlox is going to be Dr. Yoda plus comic relief. Sure, why not?

The weakest player in this outing is Malcolm Reed, mainly by virtue of not being given overmuch to do. He's cynical about the transporter and British. And pretty into the butterfly ladies. We don't quite know what makes him tick yet, though.

What to say about the plot? When I first watched Enterprise, I was very worried about the introduction of a time travel plot in the very first episode of the show. I felt strongly that the show and its new time period needed to stand on their own two feet, and a time travel plot was too tempting a way to introduce familiar characters. That fear wasn't really justified. But I still distrust time travel here. It's very messy and introduces uncertainties and a looming threat of reset buttons.

Here, it's just a distraction. Everything about the Suliban in this pilot is too complicated for me to really care about or get into it. All the stuff about genetic enhancements and not waiting around for evolution is theoretically compelling, but I was worn out enough focusing on the new crew and their mission. The bad guys just didn't need to be that deep. When Archer meets a Suliban woman, she kisses him, and she gets shot dead less than five minutes later, it was hard not to feel like I was being manipulated inexpertly.

The plot works best when we're on board the Enterprise and the central conflict is between Archer and T'Pol or Trip and T'Pol. Still, "Broken Bow" lumbers through it's messy pilot with it's share of witty lines, fun moments, and cool action scenes, and sets us up with a promising premise. Archer and T'Pol don't like each other, but they've earned each other's respect and they're both going to commit to the relationship. The Enterprise NX-01 is heading out on an exploration mission it's not quite ready for. All is right with the Star Trek world.

Random Observations:

- It's been said before, but 3 weeks from Earth to Q'onos at Warp 4.5 badly contradicts everything fans had figured out about Star Trek spacial geography and was, in my opinion, a large part of, or at least highly representative of the initial fan backlash against the show. Fanon explanations abound and are hilarious as usual, including a suggestion that "Q'onos" is a generic Klingon word for "capital" and that the capital of their space was moved at some point in time.

- Another big complaint at the time was that the Vulcans in this show were too dickish. But honestly, most Vulcans we see on Star Trek kind of are. Sarek is probably the nicest full Vulcan we ever meet, and even he's kind of rude.

- How long will it take Star Trek fans to see Scott Bakula and not immediately think Sam Beckett has leapt into their Captain's body? Too long, I should think, although I guess this show was made for people much younger than that reference.

- The torch-passing cameo here is a weak one, but the best that could be done given the circumstances. James Cromwell reprises the role of Zephram Cochrane from Star Trek: First Contact, but only on a screen in a scene that feels pretty out of place in an already overstuffed script.

- Ok, the decon gel. Just the worst possible way to try to make your show sexier.  If you want to make your show sexier (and I object on principal to trying to make Star Trek sexy, it's almost always disastrous) you need to actually involve sex. Having your characters randomly getting in their underwear and rub stuff on each other, while having a completely unrelated plot-heavy conversation is just ... bizarre? Exploitation? Basically the set up for a bad space porno? It's definitely a "What the heck were the producers thinking?" thing, and I even thought that when I was a teenage boy.

- One thing that's grown on me a lot is the opening credits sequence. It's a very big departure from previous shows, but it's a welcome one, visually stimulating and with a nice, chill song.

Caretaker, Parts I and II (VOY)

When Voyager premiered in 1995, I was in first grade. When it ended I was just starting middle school. Somewhere around season 3, my family moved and didn’t have a TV for a while, and I missed a whole big chunk of it. I’ve picked some of that up in reruns, but I am nearly certain there are at least four or five episodes I’ve never seen. I’ve definitely never watched the whole thing straight through, and there are many, many episodes I haven’t seen since I was a kid.

In other words, my familiarity with this show is much lower than with TNG. I am looking forward to seeing whether or not I even like this show as an adult. I hope I do, because otherwise it’s going to be a long five years.

            Okay, so the first thing we see on the screen is an opening title crawl. No, we’re not watching the wrong Star franchise, the producers just felt that would be the best way to get a mostly irrelevant political situation out of the way so they could dive right in and open the episode with a space battle. But, as some of you are not as familiar with TNG or DS9 as I am, let me summarize. Several years ago the Federation ceded some territory to the fascist, reptilian Cardassians. Some human and Bajoran colonist refused to leave that territory. Buying or stealing ships, they formed the Maquis, a sort of sympathetic terrorist group, fighting to reclaim their homes.

It is a dark time for the Rebel Alliance.

           We meet three of these noble outlaws, as their tiny ship is chased by a Cardassian warship. Chakotay, a badass-looking human with a tribal tattoo, B’Elanna Torres, a half Klingon with a temper, and a Vulcan named Tuvok. To escape their foe, they run head first into some sort of unstable graviton wave and we fade to white. Then, opening credits.

            These are the prettiest credits. They’re under this kind of serene, majestic orchestral theme, which is weird because we just saw this violent, action-packed opening and there’s sort of a sense of whiplash going on. But it’s not too bad. The visuals in the credits are also super gorgeous, and I’m pretty sure I never want to skip this main title sequence. Seriously, it gets an A+. Okay, moving on.

           The scene opens on a Federation Penal colony. It seems quite pleasant for a prison, but this is Starfleet we’re talking about, so that makes sense. We meet two main characters – Tom Paris, a former Maquis serving his time, and Captain Kathryn Janeway. She wants Tom to come along on a mission to track down his old captain, Chakotay, in exchange for his parole. Paris reluctantly agrees.

The signature pose, a Janeway trademark.

            This scene does do things. It gets some nasty exposition out of the way, and it introduces two of our main characters. I’m gonna be talking about Tom a lot in this review, but for now he’s sort of playing a poor man’s Han Solo. He’s over playing it, but part of that is the heavy-handed dialogue meant to shoehorn in all the exposition. So we’re getting an archetype from Tom, but we’re getting it clearly, and he’s charismatic enough that its not jarring. We’re not getting much off Janeway yet. She’s trying hard to be a hardass, but she’s negotiating with a criminal so you can’t really blame her.

            So next we get the standard flyover with techy details on the ship in a voiceover – in this case, the voice over is given to Tom by the sexy (and doomed) Betazoid shuttle pilot he’s hitting on. Oh, and Voyager is parked at Deep Space Nine, which makes sense given that they’re headed for the badlands. Anyway, Tom is a playa. Big surprise there.

            Now we meet Harry Kim, fresh-faced academy grad, and he has a scene with DS9’s mischievous bartender Quark, which, like the McCoy scene in TNG, is sort of a passing of the torch. This is way less forced, though, because this scene serves a real purpose – setting up the Paris/Kim dynamic. And Armin Shimmerman plays Quark so naturally that it actually makes us feel like this and Deep Space Nine are part of the same world, which is fun.

            So, in a normal pilot, this next scene would just be the introduction of the ship’s doctor, an important character on any Star Trek. But even if you didn’t already know that Voyager’s entire medical staff was Doomed with capital D, you’d be able to figure it out by this guy’s total lack of defining characteristics. Same goes for Janeway’s XO. There is at least a little indication of possible conflict between Tom and the Doc, but it’s really just not worth spending time getting to know people who will be dead in 15 minutes. Voyager’s original Chief Engineer never even gets a name.

           So, Paris and Kim pay their respects to the Captain. First, we see her on the phone with her fiancé, begging him to take care of her dog. This is kind of an important scene. Even though this review is going to absurdly long as is, I kind of want to unpack it, because it’s interesting. See, Picard and Kirk never had serious girlfriends, and Sisko was a widower. So it’s interesting to me that our first female Captain is also the only one who seems to have a healthy relationship with a non-Starfleet officer. It’s sort of implying that she has a gentle, nurturing side, which is important because in order to buy her as a Starfleet captain we have to see her being kind of a hardass for most of the pilot.

            The other important thing about this scene is it establishes that Voyager is a short range ship. It’s not meant for deep space exploratory missions like the Enterprises were. It goes out, it does a thing, it comes back. That’s why Janeway is able to have a fiancé and a dog. This is a major source of conflict in the first two seasons, so it bears pointing out.

Ok, Paris and Kim come in, there’s an interesting exchange about terms of address. She doesn’t like being called Sir, or Ma’am, preferring Captain. You would think by the 24^th century this kind of terminology would be standardized – Kim’s confusion implies that even now, a woman in the Captain’s chair raises some eyebrows. I can’t believe that’s actually the case. 

We’re almost to the Delta Quadrant. But first, we have a cool conversation between Kim and Paris, where we learn more about Paris and how he got kicked out of Starfleet. The writers clearly think Tom is the most interesting character, giving him way more time in this episode than anyone else.

So, Voyager gets to the badlands, encounters the WAVE OF DOOM, and everything goes to shit. XO: Dead. Cute Betazoid pilot: Dead. Doctor and Nurse: Dead and Dead. Tom and Kim get to sickbay and activate the Emergency Medical Hologram, a great character who doesn’t see much play this episode but manages to introduce himself excellently in the two-minute scene he’s given. Janeway heads to engineering, and, finding the chief dead and everyone in disarray, proves that she knows her own ship just a little better than Kirk or Picard as she locks down a warp core breach all by her lonesome.

Because what you expect to see after THIS...

Is this!

Now here’s where things get kind of dumb. Everyone is suddenly beamed to a farm. A kindly old woman offers them corn on the cob, there’s a banjo player, and this is incredibly jarring given where we’re coming from. Specifically, everyone’s acting is off. I mean, no one is really tempted by the obviously fake hospitality, but I’m weirded out by how not traumatized these people are. This is Harry’s first mission, ever, and he’s just seen things go as wrong as they possibly can. 75,000 light years from home, most of the senior staff dead, he should be visibly freaked out. At least a little. Janeway obviously is practiced at hiding her emotions, but jeez. She just lost at least three officers she’s served with for some time, not to mention any number of people under her command, I can’t believe she’s able to roll with it this well.

Ok, rant over. This silly, jarring farm scene ends when Paris and Kim discover the generators, and the whole crew gets medically experimented on and returned to Voyager three days later. Well, except for Harry. Also, the Maquis crew sans B’Elanna also come back to their ship, and now its time for really jarring inconsistency number two: Janeway and Chakotay trust each other almost immediately.

One of many ships that never really sailed.

There’s a little yelling and phaser waving, yes. But it’s minimal. I mean seriously, these are the terrorists we were chasing. She beams them onto the bridge without even bothering to shut down their weapons (something we know transporters can do) then proceeds to suggest an away mission where she, the Captain, and the enemy Captain, are a team. As in, just them beaming down to an unfamiliar space station together. In what strange, twisted Starfleet regulation book is this okay? Picard won’t even beam down to a planet surrounded by an away team.

            So they get back to the array, and everyone is gone but the banjo player, who is picking out a sad, sad song. He keeps insisting that no one onboard has what he needs, except maybe B’Elanna and Kim. Also, he must honor a debt that can never be repaid. But his search has not been going well. Finally, he says hee doesn’t have time to send them home. NOT ENOUGH TIME!

            And he teleports them back to Voyager. But Janeway won’t give up just yet.

            Before we see what she does next, we need to check in with Kim and B’Elanna, who have been transported to an alien hospital. They have weird lesions growing on them. B’ Elanna tries to escape from the hospital (her boobs also try to escape from her robe.) She is angry and Klingon. They sedate her.

            Back on the ship, Janeway and Tuvok follow an energy pulse from the array to a planet that appears to have undergone some kind of sever ecological disaster, turning it into a desert wasteland. Tuvok is Janeway’s friend and confidant, perhaps in an attempt to recapture the Kirk and Spock dynamic of the good old days. It plays differently, with Tuvok almost seeming more of a mentor – he is nearly a century Janeway’s senior, after all.

A man of many talents.

             On our way to the planet, we have to pick up one more party member (actually, he’s the second-to-last-one, but we’ll get there) – Neelix! I’ve noticed a lot of Voyager fans hating on this crazy guy. I honestly like him a lot, though I think he had a lot of unutilized potential. But here there is no indication he will become a regular. He’s just a weird, quirky alien here to give some exposition. The Caretaker, he says, has been abducting ships from all over the galaxy for some time, apparently, and the aliens who aren’t returned are taken to the Ocampa, who live below the surface of the planet.

           Also, no one in this part of space has transporters or replicators, so water is extremely valuable. This is kind of a sweet way to emphasize how alien the Delta quadrant is, which is cool. Part of the impetus for doing Voyager was that space had become too cozy and too familiar. This is a great “We’re not in Kansas anymore” moment. The Federation and its ideals don’t exist out here.

          Neelix and Tuvok are Different as Different can be! The joke is a little bit overplayed here, but not obnoxiously so. Pilots are kind of about testing out different relationships, and this one definitely has potential. It’s fun to watch Tuvok get annoyed.

Okay, this screencap kind of looks like an interpretive dance.

          Back at the hospital, we explore another relationship – B’Elanna and Harry. Oddly enough, they trust each other less than their commanding officers, though they still get over their mistrust surprisingly quickly. I wish the show had found a way to maintain the Starfleet/ Maquis tension for just a little longer. They get released from the hospital, into the weird subterranean utopia of the Ocampa, and told they will likely die soon of this weird disease.

          So Neelix gets another dimension when it turns out he was just using Voyager and her crew like the suckers they are (seriously, they trust everyone. Some intergalactic con man is going to clean them out.) to rescue his Ocampa girlfriend from a bunch of Kazon barbarians who he apparently cheated and stole from. The Kazon are really boring bad guys right now, but I’ll reserve judgment on tem because they’re rather tangential to the episode, just there to add a little tension when the action starts to lag. I’m more interested in Kes, the Ocampa girl. She’s ambiguously telepathic, but her species only lives 9 years. She’s 2.

         This is another nice “Kansas moment”. Get used to that shorthand. I like it. Will be using it more. Kes is sort of Neelix’s shoulder angel and convinces him to help the Voyager crew rescue their people. They get underground pretty easily with her help, but B’Elanna and Harry have already escaped. Kes refuses to go back to her people, chiding them all for being children and never trying to live on their own without the Caretaker. In her own way, even though she’s never heard of Starfleet, Kes is more what we think of as Starfleet material than most of Voyager’s regulars. She’s strong-willed, principled and adventurous. 

I just thought this picture was pretty.

         Speaking of Starfleet, that’s what B’Elanna calls Harry as they try and escape. B’Elanna is pretty tough. I vaguely remember playing Voyager with my brothers and I always wanted to be B’Elanna. Draw what conclusions you will from this about my gender identity, but I just thought she was a cool cat.

          Tuvok figures out the whole mystery of the episode and explains it to the audience in painstaking detail, just in time for things to start exploding. The Caretaker is closing off the conduits to the surface. The transporters aren’t working, so everyone has to escape through the tunnels. This is just for some drama and explosions to get us above Voager’s mandatory explosion quotient (I’m convinced this is a thing.) And a little character development, maybe some building up of trust between these dispirit individuals.

          Tom and Neelix have their “Don’t be a hero” moments, since both of them tried to run away at some point and have built up reputations for selfishness. Specifically, Tom wants to rescue Chakotay and gain his trust. Or something.

Our Hero?

           For the first series focused on woman Captain, this pilot sure focuses a lot on its men. Tom, Kim, Chakotay, Neelix, and Tuvok all see more characterization than the Captain. In fact, I would say if this episode has a protagonist, it’s Tom Paris. He’s the one who changes the most throughout it, and the pilot basically starts and ends with scenes between him and Janeway.

            Voyager returns to the array as the Kazon are trying to board it with lots of little ships. Chakotay’s little ship has to hold them off while Janeway and Tuvok try one more time to talk the sad banjo player into sending them home. He can’t do it though. He accidentally destroyed the Ocampa homeworld a millennium ago, and has been caring for the Ocampa and looking for a way to turn another sentient being who could be transformed into a new caretaker. Or something. It’s unclear.

            The Maquis ship kamikazis into the Kazon mothership. Chakotay escapes in time. But the Caretaker is blowing up the array. Oh, and he’s not actually a banjo player. He’s a glowing amorphous blob. His self-destruct program isn’t working, and with his dying breath he tells Janeway to destroy the array. And she makes the decision that dooms us all to the watch this series for seven years. She’s gonna blow it up. B’Elanna disagrees. She may be Klingon, but there’s more Riker in her than Worf. She speaks her mind and plays by her own rules. Actually there are a lot of people like that in this crew.

             Janeway decides to unify the crew. Tom gets a field commission and now outranks Harry. Neelix and Kes want to stay on for a while as native guides, and we have our cast. Unlike in TNG, where the crew was basically already together, “Caretaker” feels like the early levels of a Japanese-style RPG, as Janeway has to collect all her party members. That being said, it manages to do this in an engaging, well-paced hour. It’s not perfect. Some characters feel flat, like Janeway herself, and some, like Chakotay, have personalities that will quickly change rather drastically. But it’s a pilot that makes me excited to see what happens next. 

              TNG was about Starfleet’s drive to explore. Voyager is about Starfleet’s tolerance and acceptance of everyone, and how that isn’t always as easy as it is on TNG. Harry Kim and Tuvok are now the only members of Janeway’s senior staff who she actually chose. She’s going to have to deal with a CO who’s a principled criminal, a chief engineer with major anger issues, a conn officer who’s a much less principled criminal, a piece of hardware with no desire to be human, and wacky but lovable native guides. In short, this is not your father’s Star Trek, and it’s going to be wild ride.

Until next week!

Random Observations:

Janeway served under Paris’s father when he was a Captain. She was a science officer.

Kes would have been a real asset to the Ocampa when they inevitably have to fend for themselves. It’s a pity we’re stealing her.

Space combat is different on this show than it is on TNG. It’s more Star Warsy, with small, fast ships flitting about, and a little more exciting.

Voyager clearly wants to be the spunky, youthful Star Trek, with more action and more drama. This will be a blessing and a curse.

The tradition of God-like beings figuring into pilots continues with the Caretaker.

Shuttlecraft destroyed: 0

Crew members killed: At least 12.

Trivia:

“Caretaker” was the most expensive Star Trek episode in the history of the franchise, with a budget of just over 23 million dollars. It won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Effects.

Emissary (DS9)

Nineteen ninety-three was an unprecedented year in Star Trek history. Up until then, there had only ever been one Star Trek on the air. But with the success of The Next Generation and the Original Series movies, Paramount was ready to introduce a second concurrent show.

Everything that makes Deep Space Nine special stems from this decision. With most of the Next Generation's creative team at work on TNG still, a new team of creators stepped up for Deep Space Nine. And in order for the show to draw an audience, it had to deviate from the Star Trek viewers knew. Those new creators and that new direction would spin Deep Space Nine into something different from any other show in the franchise.

(I owe a lot in the forthcoming reviews to Terry Erdmann's extremely excellent book, The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion. I've read that book so many times I've internalized a lot of it, so any behind the scenes story I tell probably comes from there (or MAYBE from the DVD special features.))

Anyway, Deep Space Nine. If Star Trek is “Wagon Train to the Stars,” as Gene Roddenberry initially envisioned it, Deep Space Nine is “The Rifleman” in space. A man and his son in a lawless, frontier town.

So, the episode starts differently than any other Star Trek pilot. It starts a few years before the action of the main show, during the Battle of Wolf 359, also known as TNG two-parter “The Best of Both Worlds.” Surprisingly little is ever done with this particular tie-in to TNG, but what's important is we see a defining moment in Benjamin Sisko's life – the death of his wife, Jennifer.

The man we're meeting, our new captain, is not a swashbuckling lady's man like James Kirk, or a married-to-the-stars lifelong bachelor like Picard (I know, in the books he's not a lifelong bachelor, but give me my rhetoric). Sisko is a single father and a widower. Moreover, he's a broken man. He's given Starfleet everything, and Starfleet has taken everything from him. And now it's sending him to the worst imaginable assignment: to oversee longterm rebuilding efforts on a decrepit space station orbiting a war-torn world.

Our new captain is also a black man. I never thought this was all that important in the 24^th Century. But what I've come to realize is it's very important here in the 21^st. It's important to Avery Brooks, and it's important to the franchise. But here, in the pilot, it has only the meaning the viewer chooses to give it. There are many more compelling things about Sisko's character than the color of his skin.

This is a pilot that moves fast. Sisko and his son arrive on the station to face one crisis after another. The station, built by the Cardassians and abandoned when they left town, is literally out to get them. The first person we meet is a hapless Miles O'Brien, freshly transplanted from TNG bit player, who has evidently been here a while trying and failing to fix up the place. A quick scene in the Sisko quarters gets at the gist: the station is a mess, and for Jake it's like when the family vacation turns out to be to a run down old cabin in the woods – and then your Dad tells you you're moving there. Cirroc Lofton nails every note of that.

O'Brien asks Sisko if he's ever met a Bajoran woman, in a way that is supposed to, I believe, remind viewers in the know of some of O'Brien's past run-ins with Ro Laren. And then we get Major Kira 1.0. The Bajoran liason officer, Kira Nerys is much angrier and more one-note than the complex character Nana Visitor will settle into over the next couple episodes. Still some nice notes in the introduction, with Sisko and Kira's first meeting being a power struggle, where neither wins easily, but Sisko clearly takes the upper hand.

One of Gene Roddenberry's cardinal rules was that Starfleet personel did not have interpersonal conflict, and on TOS and TNG that meant no intercast conflict (barring alien influences). But with non-Starfleet crew and even civilians in the cast, Deep Space Nine was free to thrive on intercast conflict, and this is evident even in the pilot.

There's a lot more to set up in this episode. Sisko blackmails Quark into staying and becoming a community leader. And the Kai of Bajor (kind of like the pope) declares Sisko to be the Emissary of the Prophets, and leads him to an ancient Bajoran artifact called an orb. The main plot of the episode is about these orbs leading Sisko to discover a wormhole into the Gamma Quadrant, in which the Prophets, non-linear aliens worshiped by the Bajorans as gods, reside.

It's a lot to take in. It's already setting itself up as a show that will require a lot more investment than The Next Generation, where all you need is a basic familiarity with the crew to enjoy any given episode. DS9 promises us politics, it promises us religion, it promises us ongoing character conflicts. Big stuff for Star Trek in 1993.

There's a scene between Captain Picard and Sisko that bears mentioning. Every pilot has a “pass the torch” guest star in the pilot. It's a tradition. But in the TNG, it's Dr. McCoy opposite Data. In Voyager it's Quark opposite Kim and Paris. Here, it's the old Captain, probably one of if not the most acclaimed actor in Star Trek history and the new Captain. And they're not being friendly with each other. It's a gutsy move, symbolically setting this show up not as a friend to TNG but as an icy rival. The scenes are nothing special, but it's a joy to watch these two actors play against each other for the first and last time. It's a moment for me where I'd like to imagine, if I were watching this show for the first time, I would know it has what it takes to carry the torch.

There's a few more regulars to meet. The writers smartly delay the arrival of Julian Bashir and Jadzia Dax, two characters it will take them a good long while to figure out exactly what to do with. Here they've chosen to have the former hit on the latter, a relationship that will never pan out, nor should it have. Dax is a Trill, which means she plays host to a symbiotic lifeform, which in retrospect was probably one more plot thread than the show needed, since unlike almost all of the others it never really ties into the larger narrative of the show. But it's ok, it's a pilot. Lots of things have been thrown in the stew, and we're seeing what works.

One thing that works is Marc Alaimo as Gul Dukat, former prefect of Deep Space Nine. He's not the first Cardassian to appear on Star Trek, but he redefines the genre, with just the right mix of smug bravado and creepiness. The supporting cast might still be finding it's legs, but the show has found it's hero and it's villian and they will both stick it out until the end.

The pilot has also found it's Trekkiness, as the tension builds on a political faceoff, but the real climax is a conversation about the nature of humanity. The Cage was about God-Like aliens testing humanity. Where No Man Has Gone before was about the test of humans turned into gods. Encounter at Farpoint saw a being with god-like powers literally put humanity on trial. Here a human being tries to teach someone's actual gods how to play baseball. Not just that, but also tries to teach them why the human experience of time, for all it's flaws, is special, meaningful, and irreplaceable.

And unlike some other god-like beings, these ones aren't going away. They'll be Sisko's neighbors for the rest of the show. The Bajorans will still live down the street, and the Cardassians will be waiting in the next town over. Emissary doesn't end with the captain pointing his finger and the ship warping away. It ends with a slow zoom out as repairs and lives continue. The message is clear: get comfortable. We're not going anywhere.

Encounter at Farpoint, Parts I and II (TNG)

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Five Year Mission. Today I will be discussing the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, entitled “Encounter at Farpoint.” This first aired a few months before I was born. But I grew up with this ship, and these characters, so the challenge for me for this show is going to be revisiting everything with a fresh pair of eyes. I’ll be trying to imagine what it was like to come at it for the first time, but also drawing on my knowledge of how it all ends up.

The familiar scene, short a few players.

So after the opening teaser, we get a nice long, pan over the exterior and interior of the shiny new Enterprise. She’s sleeker than her predecessor, larger and more powerful, and with families and children aboard she’s like a moving city. We meet Jean-Luc Picard first, in his captain’s log during the long establishing shot, and then we immediately are introduced to Data with a classic Data interaction, where he doesn’t understand an idiom, in this case, to “snoop”.

Deanna Troi, Tasha Yar, and Worf are on the bridge too, but we don’t learn much about them yet. Troi gets her first “I’m sensing” as Q shows up on the bridge.

So yeah, we meet Q before we meet half the regulars. He’s a little more sinister in his early appearances, but John De Lancie is as much of a ham as ever, so even while he’s being menacing he’s still basically a comic character. He threatens Picard, tells him humans should turn around and go home, and traps the enterprise in a net, all the while emphasizing his points by playing dress-up. Then he disappears, but leaves the net behind.

Picard decides to run, very fast. The net catches up. Picard evacuates the women and children to the saucer, leaving Worf to get them to safety, and takes the drive section into battle with Q. Worf is not happy about this, because he’s a Klingon and hates running from combat, but he does as he’s told and it’s a nice little Worf moment, which is cool, because Worf isn’t a regular yet and he barely appears in this episode.

Say what you will about the guy, he's got a killer fashion sense.

It turns out Worf had nothing to worry about anyway, because there is no fight. Picard surrenders, and he, Tasha, Data, and Troi find themselves in a post-World-War-Three courtroom where Q is judge, jury, and executioner. They are accused of being savage and barbaric. Tasha immediately confesses in a melodramatic attempt at character development and Q turns her into a popsicle as a display of his power. She gets better.

Picard convinces Q to let him and his crew prove that humans are more than mere savages, and Q says the Farpoint Mission (remember that thing Picard was talking about in his Captain’s Log? You know, before this random half hour of Q happened? No? Ok, well, there’s a space station and a mystery and we’ll get to it soon.) Anyway, Q disappears for the time being and the crew returns to the ship as if they had never left. The net is gone.

So we’re about a third of the way through the episode at this point and it kind of feels like the actual plot is just now starting. But first we have to meet four more regulars. Will Riker, the Enterprise’s first officer, is clearly intended as estrogen bait. As the series goes on Riker will be come one of my favorite characters, but his performance in this episode is kind of especially awful. It feels like a lot of focus is being put on him, but they do a poor job of establishing who exactly he is. Plus his scene with Doctor Crusher and the scene where he meets Troi and it’s revealed that they used to be lovers are both extremely stilted and awkward. Fortunately, they’re also short.

We meet Dr. Crusher and her son Wesley, who is only really annoying in one scene in this episode, in my opinion. We also meet Geordi LaForge. He’s not the chief Engineer of the Enterprise yet, and honestly I don’t think the writers know what he is. His character development in this episode consists of one scene where he tells Doctor Crusher that his visor causes him constant pain, something that’s never picked up on again. But I digress. It’s only a two-hour pilot, someone has to get forgotten about and its just kind of par for the course that it would be Geordi. They do a remarkably good job of introducing most of the ensemble without bogging the episode down too much, even if some of the backstory does feel like an infodump.

Ok, where was I? So there’s a mystery of Farpoint Station, which basically boils down to how it always seems to be able give people exactly what they need, there’s a creepy guy with the frankly awesome name of Groppler Zorn, and Picard decides to test his new first officer by having him manually reconnect with saucer section, in a scene which tries very hard to have dramatic tension, but fails because there are literally no stakes. Seriously, are we supposed to think the series is going to end 40 minutes into episode one when Riker crashes the ship into itself? It’s kind of dumb.

In my day, only the bad guys had androids.

And speaking of sort of pointless scenes, DeForest Kelly has a cameo as Admiral McCoy. It feels extremely forced. But I can forgive it because it started the tradition of every series having a regular from the previous series show up to pass the torch, which feels really sweet in its own way. And you get the impression that Bones kinda misses the old days, and especially Spock, and that’s sweet in its own way too. But it still sticks out as having no connection to the plot of the episode.

Then the aforementioned Riker/Troi scene happens. Ugh its so cheesy and eighties and awful and I don’t want to talk about it. Least favorite couple. Anyway, Troi, Picard and Riker meet with GROPPLER ZORN, Troi is overwhelmed with loneliness and despair, and I start getting bored because the actual plot of the episode is not super engaging and not much happens.

Riker meets Data and Wesley on the Holodeck. I don’t think the writers knew yet exactly the can of worms they were opening when they invented the holodeck. It seems innocent enough in its first appearance – just landscapes, no characters, which is much more plausible and less morally dubious. There is an implication that it's extremely state-of-the-art and Riker has never seen one, which will be contradicted later.

There’s a scene on the planet where nothing happens, but it’s cool to see Riker leading an away team because there’s a real attempt to engage the whole main cast in a way TOS never did. But it's still kind of a dumb, pointless scene. Geordi discovers something about the tunnels under the city and Troi experiences feelings again.

FEELINGS.

Back on the ship, Picard gives Wesley a tour of the bridge. Wesley already knows everything about the bridge and can’t resist showing off, Picard gets predictably annoyed and kicks him off the bridge, and we setup a conflict that will persist for at least, like, a season. Then an alien ship shows up and starts shooting at the Bandi cities.

Q comes back to taunt Picard, but he’s also kind of trying to drop big hints and get him to figure out the mystery, almost as if he wants them to pass the test. Ultimately, they do – Picard, Troi, and Data figure out that the alien ship is a lifeform that can convert energy into matter and Farpoint Station is its mate, enslaved by the Bandi. They free the station and both of them transform into space jellyfish, which fly away holding hands.

Shiny happy space jellyfish laughing...

The episode ends with the ship departing for parts unknown, with a “Let’s See What’s Out There” from Picard, which is his catchphrase for season one. It’s corny, but I think it’s this kind of optimism that enabled this show to make it to a second season. There’s definitely a sense of fun, of adventure for its own sake. I don’t think any other series totally made that work as a motivation.

Ultimatley, that’s why the weird plot-within-a-plot of Q using the Farpoint mission to test Picard works for me. It sets up what the show is about – the need to explore- by threatening that need directly. And we don’t ever go back to the courtroom – because the jury is still out. Q is still watching this crew, to see how they’ll handle all the challenges that await them. And the show doesn’t really forget that.

I’m looking forward to continuing this adventure myself, especially the part that involves getting out of the sometimes gag-inducing first season and into the good stuff. But first we’re going to jump ahead seven years and see how Kathryn Janeway’s first mission out compares to Jean-Luc’s. It will be cool to see how the two shows handle their growing pains by looking at them side by side. Anyway, thanks for joining me, and until next time, may your encounters with Omnipotent beings always be judicious.

Random Observations/ Continuity Errors:

Data says he graduated from the academy in ’78, which doesn’t fit into the timeline of the show at all. I noticed this on my own without looking at the timelines on Memory Alpha, in case there was any doubt about how much of a dork I am.

The Ferengi get name-dropped here, though we won’t see them until “The Last Outpost.” Apparently they were supposed to be the show’s major villain. That didn’t happen.

The computer is way more polite than usual! It says “please” and “thank you” all the time. They dropped that very early on.

Recurring character watch: Even in his very small role (he’s credited as Battle Bridge Conn officer), Miles O’Brien makes an impact with really memorable facial expressions in several reaction shots. 

Troi: “I’m only half Betazoid, my father was a Starfleet officer.” Implies that Betazed isn’t a Federation planet, which is later contradicted.

Troi and Tasha both wear mini-skirts at some point. These mercifully disappear early into season one.

Q’s Elizabethan grammar is terrible.