Did the Xindi War kill the Archer character for you..

To be honest I found Archer one of the more bland Captains out there not to mention a hypocrite.

But I labeled him as boring but harmless.

No real dislike but a faint hope he could be more.

Then came the Xindi war...

What in the Seven Hells of ID where they thinking ? Was this some sort of misguided attempt to give Archer an edge instead of inexperianced Whiney boy?

Let's show how tough Archer is but having him go on a roaring rampage of revenge. Let's make this Archer tougher then Sisko and hard nosed willing to wipe out a scanning station and mugging friendly aliens because he is a win at all cost captain.

Then how the hell did he come off as an idiot?

Daniels- Captain, your existence is vital to the future.
Archer- Dagnabit forget about that I have to try to sacrafice myself for the fifth time this year because I am too manly and too fatherly a Captain to let more experianced people say like Mayweather steer the Insectoid ship into the superwomen,.
Daniels - But ...
Archer - Shut up, this is my moment to show how fearless and determined I am by piloting a ship I have had 30 min practice on into certain death!
Daniels-Ummmm...

We get it, Archer is pissed. I could tell by all the scowling they had him doing. But the plan was nuts, the execution was Stupid and it was only blind luck that some Xindi was actually willing to listen.

We should have got a year showing why Archer was vital to the future to the Federation. Instead we got this Xindi arch that only managed to illustrate why this Idiot should not be Captain of a starship. Least of all ships named Enterprise.

That ended all hope I had for Archer.

 

Every series has made a point to turn the captain into savoir of the universe. Picard saving the human race several times. Ben reaching a level of demigod. Janeway, well, she got to defeat the borg. By the time Enterprise came out I guess I was used to it.

The Xindi arc is when Archer's character really began to shine. At last the captain had some hard decisions to make and did not blindly follow the primary directive that always drove me crazy in TNG. When archer put the alien in the air lock I thought "It's about time they make him a real person." For the first time ST writers were showing a captain that acted like most any military leader would when trying to save the earth.

 

For me, it brought back the promise Archer showed in "Broken Bow". As for being suicidal, fearless, determined, whatever... his reasoning was perfectly understandable in "Azati Prime". No longer able to live with ordering more people to die. This was a long way from the exploration mandate he had been used to up to that point. It's far too easy to blast Archer by the standards of 24th Century Starfleet, where good task delegation skills are all you need to be the Captain.

 

Not in the least. The Xindi conflict only confirmed what I already knew about Archer: He was to be the most important figure in Federation History.

 

Oh, lord.

The Xindi Arc certainly helped to improve Archer, but the damage done in Seasons One and Two could never fully be repaired. He was too far gone by "The Expanse" to have truly been salvageable.

 

Most important person in the Federation!?

I will agree, I will not see eye to eye regarding his worth.

But most importatant person in the Federation?

They didnt even start touching apoun building the Federation till Season four and even then it was tied in at the end. Moreso he gave a few long speechs done better elsewhere.

So yeah...most important person. We should have had four years building to that. Showing us WHY he was important. Bakula could have delivered the goods given the right script.

But no.

If only we could have heard the major speech he was meant to give in These are the Voyagers but they didnt give us that.

We ended up with a Next Generation episode instead.

 

Absolutely not! The Xindi arc gave me an Archer I could actually respect.

In seasons one and two he was so inconsistent as to strike many as hypocritical: "I'll come to the aid of people who are beyond being helped (Fight or Flight) or didn't ask for my help (Andorian Incident, Marauders) and refuse to help anyone who begs for my help (Cogenitor)."

In the Xindi arc he found focus and a profound sense of purpose. And the more losses the ship suffered, the more he suffered, becoming a darker, more interesting character. You couldn't guess what he'd do next, not because of inconsistency, but out of desperation.

 

[QUOTE

In the Xindi arc he found focus and a profound sense of purpose. And the more losses the ship suffered, the more he suffered, becoming a darker, more interesting character. You couldn't guess what he'd do next, not because of inconsistency, but out of desperation.[/QUOTE]

^^I agree completely. Watching Archer forcing himself to torture the pirate was one of many great character moments I never thought I'd see during year 1 and 2.

 

^^ And killing Sim, ordering the destruction of the Xindi communications station (killing 3 Xindi without warning), stealing a warp core, tricking Degra (and then using the information he obtained to win him over as an ally -- which would cost Degra his life), blow up Dolim (I so loved that moment. No Bruce Willis-style "yippie-ki-yay !" Just a very grim, very very angry man taking out the enemy ... awesome!)

 

I'm near the end of re-watching Season 3 as I type this ("The Forgotten"), and I've enjoyed watching Archer's transformation from naive and inconsistent to hard-edged and tortured. I can actually buy his inner turmoil, from throwing the pirate into the airlock near the beginning of the season, to raiding the ship for the warp coil near the end (in "Damage").

 

As for myself, I actually found Archer to be a refreshing change from previous captains. Most captains in Star Trek (aside from guest actors, of course) are portrayed as unilaterally good and pure in their intentions if not their results. While many people complain about Archer's morally questionable decisions in the series, I actually LIKED them.

Some of Archer's choices made him seem like he was in over his head. Other choices, such as the "prisioners out of airlocks" choices, made Archer seem like he could be pushed to a place where he made bad (or morally questionable) decisions. As for me, that made Archer more interesting and not less so.

 

Archer making the occasional poor or ill-informed decision and not always having the right answer? Good idea.

Archer being inconsistent, pushy, and hypocritical? Not a good idea.

 

Archer was pissed at himself, not at the Xindi. Over the last few months he tortured the pirate, had his first crew-members die on him, he allowed the creation and murder of Sim, and he killed three people on the sensor station. And that's not to mention the hundreds that were going to die if the plan to blow up the weapon were to be successful. A part of him didn't feel that he deserved to live due to all he had done and was looking for an easy and justifiable way out.

It may not of been the right thing to do, or even the heroic thing to do, but it was the human thing to do. That's all I want out of drama.

 

Kind of hard to tell. All I could tell he was pissed off most of the time. Clenching his teeth, yelling a bit.

Shrugs.

Still, at least he was animated then the last two seasons.

 

Can I ask why it is not a good idea? He's human, and humans are usually all of those things.

 

I wouldn't say that the Xindi arc killed the character. Changed him, yes, but killed him? No.

The problem is, there is usually one thing that truly tests the captain of the series. Kirk, the death of Spock, and then his son, David - or more to the point, how Kirk 'never faced death before'. Picard had it with the introduction of the Borg. Sisko, the Dominion. Janeway, (for me, it was) the Hirogen...the first time, she had to compromise with the enemy.

In Archer's case, the Xindi brought home what his mission was all about - being all alone, and finding out that the rule book had to be thrown out of the window. He was truly on a mission of exploration, and that some enemies were bigger and tougher than he was. For me, it harked back to a line that Q says in Q-Who:

And Archer found that out the hard way.

He even said it when he returned to Earth, he wasn't the same person before the Xindi attack. He freely admitted it.

 

I agree. It took away that idealism that everyone was going to be friendly and love these new additions to the universal community.

 

Can't agree with your premise, if anything season 3 showed something we hadn't gotten for a Captain in ANY previous Star Trek series - character development.

The character of Archer changed and grew signifigantly as the series progressed. Contrast how he was during season one to how he behaved during and after season two's Regeneration, and then through season 3 and 4.

Hell, in TOS Kirk was the same basic character from the first to the last episode. In TNG the ONLY character development Picard ever had was that by the end, he tolorated children on the ship a little more (and sorry, finding out he had a chance to be an archeologist ISN'T 'character development'). As for Ben Sisko (DS9); finding out you're the offspring of a human and a quasi-dimensional alien in th final season isn't much. Character-wise he was the same arrogant, pompus-ass character he was when he first stepped on DS9. I gave up on the crapfest called 'Star Trek: Voyager' after the episode 'The 37's' - so as far as Captain Janeway is concerned, schizophrenia isn't character development either (you want to talk about an inconsistently written Captain in Star Trek, she's your poster-girl ).

So, the fact that Johnathan Archer went from a 'wide-eyed or optomistic' type of explorer to a more hardened, and somewhat guarded/pessemistic explorer by season four made a lot of sense given what we saw him go through starting in the second half of season two on. He was a fun character to watch.

 

I think the main reason Archer became grimmer was to reflect contemporary events, with wide-eyed idealism feeling out of sync with the popular mood post 9/11.

But it actually works well as part of his character's development. He starts out as a happy idealist, gets smacked in the face and becomes disillusioned for a while, then gets his groove back when he turns his bad experiences into something positive by dedicating himself to founding an interstellar union so that things like the Xindi crisis won't happen again.

So if you see his dark period in the Xindi arc as a way of taking him from being someone who's a little naive, happily gallivanting around the galaxy, to someone who's focused and determined, a man on a mission to help found the Federation, I think you could say the Xindi arc makes his character, rather than kills it.