Unexpected (ENT)

This is the episode where Trip gets pregnant. I have to admit, it was less obnoxious about that premise than I remembered it being. It's too bad that the premise itself is pretty obnoxious.

The problem is that's not really the premise of the episode. The episode doesn't deal with gender roles or pregnancy or parenthood. Trip doesn't deal with any of those things in a serious way. The situation isn't an allegory for much of anything, since the way Trip ends up pregnant is a cultural misunderstanding, not analogous to either rape or consensual sex, and the the alien inside him is never treated particularly like a baby or a living thing, more like an inconvenient growth.

So even though "Trip gets pregnant" is the tagline (and it was certainly the trailer line) it's not what the episode is about. So what IS the episode about?

The Enterprise is experiencing some weird malfunctions and power fluctuations -- mud instead of seltzer water, no gravity in the showers, things randomly catching fire in engineering, the kind of stuff that can really screw up your Monday morning.

Somehow they figure out that the problems are being caused by a tiny cloaked parasite ship that's eating their ... um ... subspace wake, or something? So they do the Starfleet boy scout thing and offer assistance. Trip travels to the ship, which has grass and fish and different air and is pretty much a world of pure imagination. But after a nap he comes to love it there and he hangs out with a young alien woman in a holodeck and they put their hands in a bowl of pebbles that lets them read each others' thoughts.

And then he fixes the ship and goes home, and everything is fine for the rest of the episode. Except that Trip's pregnant, and rather than deal critically with questions about abortion they hop into hot pursuit of the tiny invisible ship, which is not the easiest thing to do.

But they do track the ship down, and it's back at its old parasitic ways, eating the subspace wake of a Klingon ship. I think this is the first time we've seen the Klingons since the pilot. They're not very smart or honorable Klingons, and the scene where our heroes talk them into sparing the ship (and letting Trip go along when they decide to board it and steal its technology) is ... it feels like watching a nerd talk a dumb bully out of beating him up in a high school movie. It sort of weakens the image of the Klingons for me; they're both too dumb and too easily talked down.

So Trip goes over to the alien ship, fixes it for real, and it turns out that the baby is really easy to transfer to another host, and has none of Trip's DNA, so there'll be actually no consequences for him. Guess he learned a lot about pregnancy and what it's like for women, huh?

It's just not a very ambitious episode, is what it comes down to. It doesn't have any Star Trek story about the human experience it's trying to tell and it doesn't commit to the premise it does adopt. Like too many episodes of Enterprise, it just seems like a bunch of things that happen.

I may have to adjust my mindset for these reviews and stop expecting Enterprise to behave like Star Trek, with a message and a moral at the heart of every story. I know there are some people who find that a relief, who consider the moralizing of Star Trek pedantic and grating. But I think, without that, Star Trek has a bad tendency to just become Star Wars done badly.

Random Observations:

-- It's always a bit of a suspension of disbelief how easily Starfleet engineers in all the shows can fix other people's ships. But here it's especially implausible. What is so special about Trip that he can fix these people's ship better than anyone on board it, despite the technology being thoroughly alien? Trip is not, as far as we know it, a savant.

-- Enterprise has a tech creep problem. Ok, the timeline of the invention of the holodeck is problematic in and of itself: in "Encounter at Farpoint" and "10010010101" it's implied that holodeck technology is fairly new at the start of that show, but Jack Crusher was able to make Wesley holo-recordings when he was a baby. But, all that aside, holodeck technology is way too widespread during Enterprise for it to have taken another 200 years for the Federation to adopt/develop it. It's like the creators wanted to have their cake and eat it to, from a prequel-making perspective.

Ex Post Facto (VOY)

            So, out of sheer coincidence, both TNG and Voyager’s seventh episodes revolve around a crew member being put on trial on an alien world. Fortunately for me, Voyager manages to make a solid, entertaining hour of television from that premise, while TNG made “Justice”.

            Tuvok has been a background character for a while now, and while “Ex Post Facto” doesn’t give us a huge amount of insight into who he is as a person, it does at least give him an opportunity to do his job as a security chief, and show that while he’s no Odo, he’s at least a much better cop than Worf. When you think about it, investigator is such a totally natural role for a Vulcan, it’s a wonder it’s taken us this long to see one in it (though the role did fall to Spock a few times, notably in The Undiscovered Country.)

            Tom gets the secondary focus in the episode, and while his impulsiveness and relative lack of discipline continue to cause problems for Captain Janeway, ultimately his role in this episode is mostly as the damsel in distress, which doesn’t give him a lot of time to shine. My biggest regret is that the episode didn’t spend just a little more time reflecting on the nastiness of the Benean’s penalty for murder (an implant that makes the perpetrator relive the victims last few minutes every fourteen hours.) It would have given the episode a little more of a sci-fi bent and given Tom more of a chance to do some acting. As it is, he manages to make his romance with Lidel at least a little bit believable, and we get a nice last scene between him and Tuvok.

            But the episode is intended as a whodunit, and in that vein, it succeeds better than most Star Trek episodes that share that premise. Tuvok, like Sherlock Holmes, is a master of logic and deduction, and like a Sherlock Holmes story, the episode gives us enough hints to try and solve it ourselves. The twist at the end, that Tom wasn’t the target at all and all of this was just a complicated way of smuggling some data to the Numiri, is a little bit of a stretch, but not enough to break my suspension of disbelief.

Along the way, the threat of the Numeri provides the opportunity for a couple space battles, which gives B’Elanna and Chakotay a chance to shine. It's a nice reminder that even though the crews have integrated, the Maquis still aren't afraid to break the rules to get things done. This, combined with Kes and the Doctor’s efforts to slow down Paris’s brain deterioration, gives pretty much the entire supporting cast something to do – no small task on a show with seven regulars. All in all, a solid, fun, exciting hour of Star Trek.

Random Observations:

I admire the costuming department for giving the Beneans a little more of a unique feel than the typical alien civvies Star Trek is so fond of, especially Lidell’s 1920’s style cigarette holder, which evoked a kind of retro sexiness. Little details like that really help sell the world the episode establishes.

The banter between Janeway and Chakotay during the space battles is cute! I don’t think I’ve seen those two have chemistry before.

Kes attempting to convince the Doctor he has free will is a really great scene. They remain my two favorite characters right now.

Tuvok is over a hundred years old. He must feel like he’s on a ship full of children. It’s a miracle he lets the Doctor (who’s technically a few months old) talk down to him.

Janeway’s mama bear attitude whenever one of her crew is threatened is becoming her defining characteristic. Her bluffing the Numiri patrols was incredibly badass, though.

Harry's main role in this episode is to get tortured - if Jonah's theory about Sulu is correct, Star Trek really doesn't like Asian people.

No fatalities.

No shuttlecraft lost (they were ready to blow one up, though.)

Photon torpedo count – still 37. They got out of that battle without firing any.

Dax (DS9)

This creatively named episode is about Dax. It was about time this show did an episode about Dax, actually. I said before that the Dax-Bashir thing (which they try to make work again in the cold open here) doesn't work because the writers started doing it before they developed either of them as characters. So far Dax has been plodding along through these scripts, rattling off some technobabble here, talking about past lives there, but generally being one-dimensional compared to the rest of the cast, with the exception being Bashir himself.

So it is really good to see Dax in the spotlight, as much as she is here. But actually its an episode about the other characters grappling with Dax, more than anything else. And that's kind of hard to care about, because, once again, the legwork isn't done. Eventually, Kira and Dax are going to be friends. But the show just started, there's no evidence they're friends yet, and yet, Kira is working her butt off trying to save Dax who doesn't want to be saved. Bashir wants to save Dax, but it feels like it's more because he wants to sleep with her than because he cares about her, and Odo wouldn't be Odo if he didn't care more about justice than people.

So, in the end, it feels like Sisko is getting out and pushing every other character, including Dax herself, to care about this damn Dax plot. It's a lot of work for him! It feels like a lot of work for the audience. Meanwhile, the intellectual core of the plot is muddled. The characters have to keep reminding us that it's an extradition treaty not a trial, but Odo saves the day by overturning the evidence of the trial, rendering the extradition trial which took up the whole episode wholly irrelevant.

Sisko and company are arguing about the question of whether Jadzia Dax can be held accountable for Curzon Dax's crimes, and that's a legitimately interesting question, but there's two problems. One, there really ought to be sufficient precedent here that it doesn't merit a hearing. The idea that its under Bajoran jurisdiction who believably might never have encountered the Trill before sort of skirts this, but it's just hard to believe its not open and shut at this point. But the second problem is that the episode never resolves this question, either legally or morally, a real problem for the question that's supposed to be at the heart of the episode.

What is at the heart of the episode, in the end, is what Dax herself thinks about this question: that no matter what her legal responsibilities, her honor binds her to keep Curzon's promises, to save Curzon's lover's reputation. I wish this worked better than it, in fact, does. But it stands to reason that, for a Trill, self-preservation is not purely self-interested. Jadzia Dax shouldn't want to die, because she shouldn't want to cut Dax's life short. And later in the show she (or possibly Ezri) expresses that sentiment. But the fact that here she's willing to put an old lover's reputation over her symbiote's life strains credibility.

So the episode is plagued with high-level problems, even though all the pieces are still fun to watch. Unfortunately, I'm afraid the high-level problems are not going away. Dax is never quite integrated into the cast. Because her backstory is so alien and so not tied into the rich history and politics of the station and the wormhole, all the episodes that focus on her for the rest of the series feel out of place, like TNG episodes cut out and put into Deep Space Nine. I don't count a single Dax episode among my favorites, even though I like the character. I think she won't really feel like part of the show fully until Worf shows up.

Random observations: 

- O'Brien is away on Earth celebrating Keiko's mom's 100th birthday, so he's not in the episode. No one cares why Jake's not in the episode, apparently.

- Speaking of people who are 100 years old, I love the old Bajoran judge lady in this episode. It's great when a bit part has a real character, and the writing shines with her. DC Fontana's last Star Trek teleplay, apparently.

- I kind of like that Odo has no problem going away to a random planet to play cold case detective. Odo is passionate about his work, and Rene Auberjonois lets just a little bit of glee shine through Odo's curmudgeonly veneer to let us know that he loves his job. It's nicely done.

Justice (TNG)

Every once in a while, an episode comes along that just makes you wonder how exactly it even got made. In this week’s adventure, for example, Wesley Crusher is sentenced to death for walking on the grass.

Wesley Crusher is sentenced to death for walking on the grass.

Would you buy that pitch? I’m not certain I would buy that pitch.

The thing is, the premise itself is richer than it sounds. “Justice” could have been a solid, if unremarkable hour of television, if the writers had taken the time to figure out exactly where the compelling conflict was and cut out all the fluff. The episode that got made, unfortunately, has too much going on to give any of it the scrutiny it deserves, resulting in an ending that feels incredibly unsatisfying and a little like cheating.

The most obvious conflict is one Kirk dealt with a few times, and Picard will deal with again in much better episodes – what right do we have to dictate the lives of others? How far will Picard go to preserve the Prime Directive? Will he sacrifice the life of a crewman? Of a child? Of the son of one of his closest friends?

The god of the Edo is a jealous god.

That’s a compelling piece of drama. It could easily have consumed most of the hour. The problem is, it’s a question the writers have never had a great answer for. The Prime Directive question was skirted earlier this season in “Code of Honor”, but on that occasion, they didn’t do much more than play lip-service to it. Here Picard, Dr. Crusher, and the Edo leaders all make their speeches, but ultimately there’s no real conflict. Picard was never really going to let them execute Wesley. He’s never really even tempted to.

The Edo are relatively primitive, but they’re protected by a god-like being residing on a ship in orbit that sort of phases in and out of our reality. This is plot point number two which could have been its own episode, with the aliens briefly possessing Data to communicate with the crew. They are upset that the Federation has been colonizing star systems in the sector, a conflict which isn’t really picked up on or resolved.

The whole “God-like being protecting a lesser society” is not a new idea, but the idea that the being is in fact not a single individual, but a ship with a crew is interesting. Unfortunately, we don’t learn much else about them, and it all feels like a wasted opportunity.

Oh right, its the eighties.

Finally there’s an undercurrent of political commentary, that is to say, of the Edo’s bizarre justice system as a satire of our own, but this element, too, is not explored in enough detail to make it interesting.

Those are my thoughts about the episode from a structural perspective. Before we go, I’d like to point out the kind of blasé attitude the crew takes towards the idea of taking advantage of the Edo’s rather free attitudes about sexuality. It kind of makes the whole crew seem like Captain Kirks, including the women (or at least Tasha.) It’s weird because later hookin’ up with alien chicks is definitely at the very least frowned upon, but I guess those regulations aren’t in effect yet?

Random Observations:

Troi gets noticibly jealous when the Edo woman is all up on Riker. She definitely still has aa thing for him.

For someone who comes from a planet with “rape gangs”, Tasha sure seems comfortable being fondled by strangers.

Given the climate and their total lack of shame, it seems odd that the Edo wear clothing at all.

It's against his programming to impersonate a deity.

Worf won’t indulge in the Edo women because they seem too fragile – some interesting foreshadowing to his relationship with Jadzia.

This is the first time an alien calls Captain Picard a god. It will not be the last.

I actually found Wesley’s “I’m with Starfleet. We don’t lie.” to be one of his more endearing moments.

The whole “Garden of Eden” metaphor goes just a little too far.

The Enemy Within (TOS)

This episode really wants to be dealt with in three parts: The good, the bad, and the silly.

The good:
This is a big episode of firsts for Star Trek. The first transporter malfunction episode. First utterance of "He's Dead, Jim." First exploration of the duality of man.

Basically, a transporter malfunction splits Kirk into good Kirk and evil Kirk. Evil Kirk wants to drink medicinal brandy, rape Yeoman Rand, and basically make trouble. He doesn't want to command the ship, until the very end of the episode. He doesn't have ulterior motives, just animal instincts. Good Kirk wants to command the ship and do Kirk-y things, but he's lost the ability to make decisions and he seems kind of confused.

The audience might be a little confused too, but this strikes me as an impressively sophisticated way to handle such an inherently silly plot. Kirk's "evil" side is superior in some ways to his good side. It's the source of his ability to command. This is actually a very dark suggestion when paired with our normal view of Starfleet Captains as paragons of good.

Of course, the most sophisticated way to show a Captain wrestling with his dark side is a little less... literally. But, taking the sci-fi format for what it is, this is a pretty nice exploration of an age-old literary theme.

The bad
When Yeoman Rand complains to Spock that the captain just tried to rape her (not in those words, of course), no one is aware of the double. Starfleet apparently doesn't have any procedure in place for this kind of situation. No guard is placed on Rand's quarters, no guard is placed on Kirk, Kirk is told about the accusation and allowed to come see Rand in sickbay and interrogate her about the attack. To her credit, Grace Lee Whitney plays that interview jut about as traumatized as she should.

To make matters worse, the story seems to play up the insult on Kirk's character as more grievous than the really traumatic breach of trust and attack on the poor Yeoman. No wonder her character disappears from the show; I'd request a transfer too! Ship needs a counselor, yo.

The silly
Meanwhile, while Kirk is playing cat and mouse with Evil Kirk up on the ship, the rest of the away party (read: Sulu and some other guys) is stranded on the planet surface, because until they fix the transporter they can't beam them up. The planet's surface is getting colder and colder in order to build tension that the up-on-the-ship story doesn't have. So far, so good. Of course, the actual scenes of Sulu standing in the cold, getting progressively colder, and inexplicably cracking jokes at the Captain and anyone who will listen send a somewhat mixed message in the tension-building department.

So what did the away team do during the mission? Well, they captured a creature that looks like a Pomeranian wearing a unicorn horn and a reptilian tail. It's as classic a cheezy TOS animal as you ever saw, but what really makes it work is just how many scenes the animal is in. It's as if the director said "We're spending good money dressing up these dogs, we're damn well going to use them." In several scenes, Kirk is talking to his crew, and one of them is just holding a dog-monster for no reason. It's awesome.

Oh, did I mention that the dog monster ALSO got evil doubled? Because it did. In fact, they use the dog monster as a guinea pig for the de-doubling procedure, and when they try it on it, it dies. (First utterance of "He's Dead Jim" on the show? Refers to a dog monster.) I think this might have been the inspiration for the "But the alien is inside out ... and it exploded" gag in Galaxy Quest.

To sum it all up:
Good, bad, and silly all together, I had a lot of fun watching the episode straight through. It's easy to find criticisms, but it's also so easy to see what people loved about this show while it was on the air. The mix of action, cerebralness, and goofiness is a complex formula made to look easy, and it all adds up to an eminently watchable show.


Random Observations:

- A lot of no Uhura going on lately. Sulu and Scotty and Rand all get to shine here, but Uhura gets I think 5 seconds of screen time.

- Shuttlecrafts, man. There is absolutely no reason not to pick up the away team with a shuttlecraft. Which sort of suggest that maybe they just don't like Sulu very much.

- Speaking of which, theory: Sulu is the Miles O'Brien of TOS. I think he's gonna get tortured a lot.

Eye of the Needle (VOY)

            Like “The Cloud”, “Eye of the Needle” seems interested in telling both an internal and an external story, and it doesn’t do the work to knit them together very well. This doesn’t exactly bother me yet, but I think these A-plot/ B-plot structures work better when there’s some thematic connection between them, and in this episode I found that lacking. Still, the A-plot of “Eye of the Needle” has a lot more substance than the storyline of “The Cloud”, and both plots lay a lot of groundwork for future episodes.

           

            The A-plot is admirably full of twists and turns, but it never really puts Voyager in any danger. There’s still plenty of tension, but it’s driven by hope, rather than fear. For the first time since “Caretaker”, our heroes see a possible way to get home. They will have their hopes raised many more times before this is over, but the first time offers unique opportunities to explore some of the relationships in the ensemble – not everyone wants this to the same extent, and some are more willing to make sacrifices than others.

           

Teeny Tiny Wormhole.

            The whole episode is a big game of good news/ bad news – “Good News - We found a wormhole to the Alpha Quadrant!” “Bad news – it’s too small to fit Voyager through.” “Good News – There’s someone on the other side we can talk to.” “Bad News – he’s a paranoid Romulan.” “Good News – we can beam through the wormhole and go home.” “Bad news – we’d end up 20 years in the past.”

           

            Ultimately, of course, the potential damage to the timeline is non-negotiable, despite Harry Kim’s protests. They do leave messages with the Romulan, but have no way of knowing if they were ever sent. For now Voyager is still alone, the isolation felt all the more acutely for being so close to home.

            The B-plot continues what I think is the most promising sub-plot, the Doctor’s self-actualization. Fittingly, it is Kes who confronts the Captain about how the crew treats him, and Janeway reacts as if someone had just told her that the toaster was feeling left out since you started making waffles all the time. This response is fascinating to me. It may be because I just watched “The Measure of a Man,” where Picard talks about humanity being judged on how it treats its technological creations, and now I feel as I’m watching his prophecy unfold. The Doctor is just as human as Data, more human in many ways, but while Data was always embraced as a member of the Enterprise crew, everyone on Voyager still views the Doc as a glorified tricorder.

This includes the Doctor himself, who has no thoughts about agitating for his rights – when Janeway asks him if there’s anything she can do for him, all he asks is for the ability to turn himself off or back on. He doesn’t see any reason to think of himself as anything other than a machine designed to perform a specific task, yet he clearly has emotional needs that could be met.

Here’s where it gets creepy. We know, from Deep Space Nine, that plenty of people use holograms for sexual fantasies, and from every show that people use holodecks to play out violent fantasies. The Doctor is not the first Hologram to achieve sentience, and he won’t be the last. Now while most likely Tom Paris’s holo-bimbos from the French pool-hall simulation don’t have complex enough programs to be considered people, where the heck do you draw that line? It’ incredibly difficult to pick a point where you can say “These holoprograms are sentient and should have rights” and “These holoprogams can be used as our playthings.”

We’re going to get into these ethical issues eventually. I hope sooner rather than later, because the way the crew treats the Doctor makes me not like the crew much at all.

Random Observations:

No Neelix this episode (or very little at least.)

Kes has an eidetic memory, which makes sense given the Ocampa lifespan. This is how they can master enough skills in such a short time and have a functioning society.

We learn that B’Elanna is estranged from her parents and hasn’t seen her human dad since she was five. I guess if you walk out on a Klingon coming back would be pretty scary.

This episode definitely puts Harry at the forefront, but we don’t really learn much about him except that he really wants to get home.

B’Elanna still calls Harry Starfleet, and the writers still haven’t caught on to their relative lack of chemistry.

Janeway answers Telek Remor's (audio only) communique in her pink slip with her hair down.  It's not super sexualized, but its a little off-putting.

Telek Remor might actually be a cargo ship captain, but given what we know about the Romulans circa 2151, it’s equally likely he’s a Tal Shiar operative. Either way, the Romulans were a good choice for this episode – their distrustfulness helps racket up the tension even more.

The scene where the Doctor worries about being left on after everyone has abandoned ship is actually a little heart-breaking.