True that. I don't mind it personally and I hadn't noticed it until it came up in here. Personally I don't watch Star Trek just to see people die, but I understand it adds a sense of realism for some.
In my view the season has really picked up in the last third. Maybe I'm just in a good mood these days?
Huh. Interesting.
By every single account he is a lovely man. The only time I've ever heard of him getting snappy was with These Are The Voyages and even then, Jonathan Frakes says he was a gent.
Maybe let me know which post or episode you are referencing? This thread is quite large now and some of these shows I watched over a year ago. Welcome to the discussion though!
I finished my rewatch tonight. All 4 seasons done in little over a month.
I won’t go into detail as I’m aware that other people are rewatching themselves at a different pace, so I don’t want to spoil things for them, but my opinion sets aside the final episode, as for the life of me I still can’t fathom what possessed them to go that way….
The finale aside, I have to say, frankly, I’m staggered at how much my opinion has changed re ENT, and the amount of admiration and love I have for the series is light years away from my position from previously having watched it. It has genuinely gone from being my least favourite “Berman” Trek to standing shoulder to shoulder with TNG and DS9.
The characters are great. Travis could have done with a little more to do, but there’s always someone who misses out when there are so many good characters to write for. Archer is a brilliant leader, and Scott played him to perfection. From my previous viewing I remember him being somewhat stilted and rigid, which totally isn’t how he came across this time. On more than one occasion while I’ve been rewatching the show I’ve found myself musing just what the hell I’d watched previously. I also really liked the Trip/Malcolm dynamic. There’s always a dynamic like their’s within he crews - Data/Geordi, O’Brien/Bashir, Paris/Kim, and Connor and Dominic worked so well together. I could wax lyrical about all of the crew as I really do like them all, even Porthos!
Personally, I didn’t have any real issues with the direction that season 1 or 2 took, I enjoyed them immensely. That being said, the Xindi arc for season 3 was a timely change in both urgency and pace, which reinvigorated the show. I particularly liked how the Xindi weren’t just portrayed as nameless goons, instead having dedicated characters who appeared throughout the season. Degra in particular was a personal favourite. Season 4, was just gold. I remember one of the criticisms at the time was that they weren’t making use of the setting and the time period to tell some of the canonical stories that are Trek cornerstones; the Romulans, the Federation etc. The mini-arcs that they delivered in season 4 were just god-level in addressing both those issues and some real long-term Trek quandaries (eg TOS-era Klingons etc).
The final episode aside, I actually thought the final 2-parter that precedes it, was a great finale in itself, with Archer delivering the type of speech that Patrick Stewart would have been proud to have had.
Seeing how far the show had come, particularly in the last 2 seasons, it really pains me to think that we missed out on 3 more years of that goodness. Equally it saddens me that, based on the interviews in the extras, that a lot of folks, particularly on the production side, are so apologetic about the show and its fortunes. It was a GREAT show, you did very little wrong. It was largely down to machinations well beyond your control. Those interviews are nearly a decade old now, I hope that they’ve found peace with the show and its fate by now.
Finally, I hope more people take the time to rewatch this show. It was my first rewatch in a LONG time. Possibly since the original airings, and I have TOTALLY re-appraised it. I wonder how many more people would do the same. Trek fandom at the time was a bit of a maelstrom. I think people may view things differently today, detached from the furore that was Trek-fandoms at that time.
It won\t be decades until my next rewatch, that’s for sure.
A very lovely post and thank you for sharing. At times I find I'm having the opposite experience wirth Season 1. I quite liked it way back when, but I'm finding it has been a series of ups and downs on a rewatch. When it's up though, it's really up.
And Blalock is the beating heart of this show for sure. I'd describe the cast as generally solid with Dominic Keating being the actor with the most limited range, but Blalock's T'Pol is a brilliant character, brilliantly portrayed by a brilliant actor.
Fun!
ENTERPRISE: EPISODE 24
DESERT CROSSING
"What impressed me most was his treatment of Earth history as causes and motivations rather than dates and events."
So, let’s start by asking the question: “Is casting Clancy Brown in anything basically a good idea?”. The answer of course is unambiguously “Yes”, so that’s a positive beginning to thoughts on Desert Crossing, a story that refuses to serve up easy answers and makes further headway into forging a unique path for Enterprise to follow.
In Season 1, Enterprise has been (mostly) a show that has shied away from creating its’ own identity. Sometimes this has manifested itself in ways which are less obvious, such as making deliberate effort to focus on a triumvirate of characters, one a Vulcan, rather than give focus to a wider ensemble, as in TOS. So far, so good and I have no problem with that. It may be derivative of TOS, but then that’s something that was part of the shows’ initial manifesto. A back to basics approach if you will. But then we’ve had the less pleasing in the various ‘call-forwards’ that have shown up throughout the season. These instances range from the tired (a focus on Klingon stuff, Ferengi, Nausicaans etc.) to the irritating. What I have called the “nudge nudge - wink wink” moments, such as asininely wondering out loud if transporters could ever be used for people, or having Archer muse upon possibly getting a set of directives one day, the importance of which is prime to him…
The net result of this is a show that has locked itself out of its’ own playground and has contented itself with playing around in those of other shows. A prequel which is blind to the history that it is supposed to be playing with. This has at times given Enterprise a certain sense of redundancy in the first season, with episodes very often feeling like TNG/Voyager episodes with a slightly low-tech re-skin.
"You, Zeons! What kind of monsters are the Zeons sending against us?"
Enterprise has been the most successful on the rarer occasions when its’ focus has been on building its’ own corner of the Star Trek Universe. Most obviously we can see this in the various Vulcan/Andorian episodes that we have in Season 1. I don’t necessarily think that serialisation would have been the right path for Enterprise, but there is something satisfying in being able to join the dots between some episodes. When Shran comes back and makes reference to something that happened in a previous episode in which he featured then we have a sense of continuity at least, as well as a broader focus on races which rarely feature in other shows. Plus it gives some weight to actions made by characters in those episodes as they have to deal with the consequences of their decisions.
Desert Crossing serves almost as a coda to Season 1, using previous episodes to construct a mythology around the exploits of the NX-01, with this episode further serving as a kind of unexpected bookend to Detained. Clancy Brown’s character, Zobral, specifically sought out Archer and the NX-01 due to a pretty extreme game of ‘telephone’ in which our Captain is thought of as a legendary superhero who is in charge of the Galaxy’s Greatest Warship. As with Shran, just a little continuity is adhered to here, callbacks we might say, but the results pay dividends. Not only are the events of Detained enriched, also the sense that the show is going forwards and trying to do something is maintained.
So we have Archer envisioned as a kind of space-faring Robin Hood, flying from planet to planet in his ship, punishing the oppressor and standing with the oppressed… and from there we have this seasons second conversation about the Prime Directive:
However, where early in the season this felt contrived, here it feels earned. Because Archer has been zipping from one place to the next, making friends, saying “hi”, shooting at people and generally acting like a law unto himself. The NX-01 has crossed borders, dropped crew in on planets unannounced (and sometimes unwelcome) with Archer, to some extent at least, treating his mission as a game. 2 episodes from the end of the season, we finally get some real payoff with Archer forced to consider how his behaviour has created an ad-hoc legend around himself and he’s naturally very uncomfortable with it. It’s beautifully done.
Because Hoshi has a point. Contact one group and you risk earning the ire of an opposing group, as in Desert Crossing. From Archer’s point of view he was just playing an alien sport with some guy he met in space, but from Trellit, our ‘Chancellor of the Week’ character, doing so is only a few steps away from being an act of war, as it turns out Zobral is thought of as a terrorist. Imagine if aliens made first contact tomorrow, but with Russia and Putin as Earth’s emissary. If that amount of technology, knowledge and weaponry suddenly fell into Russian hands, the entire world would be in a panic, extraterrestrial visitors would be declared an enemy by many nations and we’d be in a whole bunch of a mess. Whereas (as with Archer) our nameless extraterrestrial visitors would perhaps just think they’d met a cool guy in the name of exploration and not understand what all the fuss was about.
"Why? Because without us to hate, there'd be nothing to hold them together. So the Party has built us into a threat, a disease to be wiped out."
Also, considering again the time it was made in and that Desert Crossing makes specific reference to Detained, we are back in nuanced territory in terms of examining exactly what it means to be a terrorist. Amidst the jingoistic rhetoric that permeated US politics following the tragic events of 9/11, in Desert Crossing we have an episode which looks at terrorism (at least tangentially) from the point of view of partially deconstructing the concept, as in Detained. But where Detained went down the path of rightfully pointing out that though terrorism is something that’s usually connected with ethnicity and how its’ wrong to assume everyone of that ethnicity is a terrorist, in Zobral we have a character who is given motivation and justification for his (perceived, as we never really see him commit acts of terror) actions.
What we end up with is a story that massively avoids making any kind of silly blanket statements such as ‘all people who fight for their rights are bad’ or ‘all terrorists are evil'. We have here an episode that blurs the line between the word ‘terrorist' (which in most contexts tends to have incredibly negative connotations) and the word ‘rebel’. Remember that commonly in Science Fiction it’s the rebels that tend to be coded as the ‘good guys’. An obvious example would be Star Wars in which the Empire are in every sense presented as a monolithic, totalitarian regime and the rebels are plucky do-gooders. However, Desert Crossing averts this by pointedly refusing to answer the questions it raises. We hear from both sides of this episode’s conflict and both sides give justification for the other being morally-abhorrent. Zobral’s people have been systematically oppressed for centuries, yet according the other side this is not the case, as the Zobral has been waging terror attacks on innocent people. Who’s the good guy here and who’s the bad guy? In a sense we as the audience are pulled towards Zobral, but then maybe that’s because we see him gift Archer a wall hanging and witness him cavorting in the desert heat to play a board game…
In fiction, where is the line between terrorist and rebel? We cheer when Luke Skywalker takes down the Death Star, but we don’t stop to think about the people onboard. Thousands I guess, all or most of who'm presumably have family, friends… Is Luke Skywalker the Hero of the Rebellion or a Mass Murderer?
Like I said, no easy answers and crucially no judgements. Zobral has committed crimes and by doing so he is labelled as a terrorist, but his character is humanised enough to give that word some nuance. At the same time, for Star Trek to be asking these kinds of questions in a post 9/11 world… Well, it’s the right thing for Star Trek to do. It’s easy to point a finger. It’s easy to say terrorists are bad… but Desert Crossing sidesteps the obvious in order to go deeper and ask “Why?”:
This is terrorism as a matter of perspective then, which is a much more complex way to look at the whole concept, especially when it’s done through the mouths of two, biased and unreliable narrators. Zobral’s People and the Torothans both think of the other as the danger, as the ‘other’ and as the enemy. In this instance I don’t find it even remotely frustrating that we are not given the answers. The concept of an ‘enemy’ is by its’ nature a fluid one. Sure, the Torothans come across as less than pleasant, but would we have felt differently if the NX-01 had made contact with them first? Would we have felt less inclined towards Zobral’s people if we hadn’t seen Archer and Trip playing weird desert hockey? Right and wrong, good and bad, these binary notions are next to useless in terms of exploring complex topics and in Desert Crossing Star Trek rightly opts for the middle path, forming a story that is layered and makes the viewer ask uncomfortable questions.
Finally, Archer has to turn tail, having learned that his actions in Detained, however justified, had greater consequences than he could imagine. Space is big, but not so big that other races don’t take notice, and the NX-01 has been drawing a lot of unwelcome attention. The Archer of Broken Bow may have been less reluctant to fall in line with Zobral, but in Desert Crossing our Captain, a Captain who remember, usually defines himself as an explorer, finds himself cast as a warrior and is embroiled in a conflict that he barely understands as a result. Finally his hubris pays him back with interest and he nearly ends up dead with Trip in the desert as a result.
So in summary, one of the seasons stand out episodes. A good guest star, a moral quandary, some great location work… what’s not to like here?
Happy times and places,
Richard S. Ta.
All images reproduced with the permission of Trekcore.com
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) And then that was it, Xindi arc and no time for another one. It would have been nice to see him given more to do, and obviously had the show had another 3 years, I’m sure he’d have had them.
