“Terra Nova”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga and Antoinette Stella
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 1, Episode 6
Production episode 006
Original air date: October 24, 2001
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise is heading to Terra Nova. It was the first extrasolar Earth colony following the pioneering of warp drive, but it also went completely quiet seventy years earlier. Because it was a nine-year journey there—and because the last communications with the colony were arguments over whether or not more people should join the settlement—the final fate of the colony had remained unknown until now, when Enterprise can actually get there without the lengthy travel commitment.
They arrive and can’t detect any life signs, though there are remnants of a city, but it’s long abandoned. T’Pol also detects radiation, but it’s low-level enough that a landing party would be safe for a while.
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Archer, T’Pol, Reed, and Mayweather take a pod down. The colony ship, the Conestoga, was taken apart and used to build the settlement, which makes it unlikely that the colonists went offworld. There are no bodies, either, just structures. Mayweather heads to the communications center to try to see if they attempted to contact Earth, or anyone else, since the last time anyone heard from Terra Nova.
Reed sees a person spying on them and chases him into a cave. Archer and Reed enter the cave while T’Pol and Mayweather stand guard. They’re ambushed, and Reed is shot. The attackers are humanoid, but with seriously damaged skin.
While Reed is taken hostage, Archer, T’Pol, and Mayweather escape to the shuttlepod. T’Pol reveals that, biologically, the people who attacked are human.
Tucker is able to locate Reed in the cave system, but they’re too deep to even try the transporter, and also the planet is geologically unstable. Archer goes back down with Phlox and tries to negotiate with the Novans, who insist that humans are the enemy, having attacked them with poison rain.
They allow Phlox to treat Reed, but he needs to have the bullet removed from his leg, which Phlox can’t really do in a cave. Phlox also reveals that one of the oldest people there, Nadet, has lung cancer—and also that he can cure it. Archer convinces Nadet and her son Jamin to accompany them back to Enterprise, but only if Reed remains behind as a hostage. Archer agrees.
In sickbay, while Nadet is being treated, Archer shows her and Jamin pictures from the Terra Nova colony that Mayweather—who’s something of a nerd regarding the legend of the lost Terra Nova colony—dug up. It shows that humans lived on the surface, but the Novans insist that humans drove them from the surface. Nadet, though, realizes that the little girl in one picture is her as a child.
T’Pol and Tucker have discovered the source of the radiation: an asteroid that collided with the surface. The debris cloud and the radiation forced the colonists underground. Mayweather and Sato have gone through the communications, and discovered that the colonists erroneously thought the asteroid was an attack by Earth to take the colony by force, which is likely what led to the distrust of humans they see now, seventy years later.
Phlox reveals that the water table is still contaminated from the radiation, and the colony will be extinct if they don’t move. They refuse to go offworld, but other parts of the planet are not contaminated, farther away from the impact of the asteroid. Archer tries to convince Jamin and Nadet that they need to move their settlement, but Jamin is adamant that they leave them alone and never come back.
Archer flies them down in a pod, but when they land, the earth beneath the pod gives out and the pod tumbles through the sinhkhole into the caves. Another Novan is trapped under a rock, and Jamin and Archer have to work together to rescue him.
Nadet convinces the Novans that they should listen to Archer and his crew, as she realizes that that really was her in that picture. They agree to relocate, which Enterprise helps them with.
After the pod is retrieved and the relocation is completed, Enterprise heads off to its next assignment, having finally solved the riddle of the lost Terra Nova colony.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, if an asteroid hits your planet, it turns you into someone with blue gunk all over your skin…
The gazelle speech. Archer goes out of his way to be reasonable with the Novans, but he doesn’t get them to trust him until he performs a daring rescue, because of course he does.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol very cleverly manipulates Archer into realizing that just taking the Novans back to Earth and assuming they’ll reintegrate is a spectacularly stupid idea.
Florida Man. Florida Man Locates Crewmate in Vast Cave System.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox can cure lung cancer, and also is perfectly happy to leave a patient with a bullet embedded in his leg sitting in a damp cave for hours on end.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… Humans did not ask the Vulcans for help with finding out what happened to Terra Nova because, as Tucker says, “Asking favors of the Vulcans usually ends up carrying too high a price,” which is a spectacularly stupid reason.
I’ve got faith…
“I’m not familiar with the early years of human space exploration.”
“Really? Every school kid on Earth had to learn about the famous Vulcan expeditions.”
“Name one.”
[after a very very long pause] “History was never my best subject.”
–T’Pol and Tucker making fun of each other, and T’Pol winning.
Welcome aboard. Veteran actor Mary Carver plays Nadet—she’s probably best known for playing the mother of the titular characters in Simon and Simon—while the great Erick Avari plays Jamin. Avari previously appeared as a Klingon in TNG’s “Unification” and a Bajoran in DS9’s “Destiny.” Two other Novans are played by Brian Jacobs and Greville Henwood.
Trivial matters: Phlox’s species—Denobulan—is spoken aloud for the first time in this episode, when he identifies himself to the Novans.
This is the only Trek writing credit for Antoinette Stella, who served as a producer for the first half of the season. It’s the first of nine episodes of the show directed by LeVar “Geordi La Forge” Burton.
Mayweather is telling T’Pol about Earth-based mysteries akin to Terra Nova, mentioning Judge Joseph Force Crater and Amelia Earhart. The mystery of Earhart’s disappearance will be solved by the U.S.S. Voyager two centuries hence in “The 37’s.”
It’s been a long road… “He speaks in shale!” There are elements of this episode that are quite good. I love Mayweather’s nerding out over getting to solve the Terra Nova mystery, and I especially love the way T’Pol rhetorically traps Archer into realizing that just relocating the Novans to Earth is a spectacularly horrible idea. Plus casting Erick Avari is never a bad idea, and he and Mary Carver both do a good job with the Novans’ mistrust. And I like that the Novans’ use of language has evolved over the decades, a bit of attention to linguistic detail that Trek rarely gets right.
But, unfortunately, there are a lot more elements of this episode that are really awful, starting with the Novans’ makeup, which varies wildly depending on what set they’re on. Seriously, the radiation gunk looks completely different on Enterprise from how it looks in the shuttlepod, which is different again from how it looks in the caves. They spend how much per episode, and they can’t get this right?
Plus, if this is such a big mystery, one that Earth has been wondering about for seven decades, why wasn’t it the first place Enterprise set course for once they dropped Klaang off on Kronos? Even if it was still several weeks away, why wasn’t it their first intended destination? They still could’ve stopped off at the various other spots on the way, but this should’ve been a priority…
Also the fact that Earth didn’t ask the Vulcans to check out Terra Nova makes nothing like sense, even taking into account that Enterprise is determined to show us that the humans of the twenty-second century are whiny, smug, arrogant morons who generally act like six-year-olds. To make matters worse, the old communications from the colony specifically mention the idea of the Vulcans being sent to help them when the asteroid hits.
It’s especially frustrating because the concept here is an excellent one, but the execution is slow and boring and predictable and lifeless.
Warp factor rating: 4
Rewatcher’s note: The Enterprise Rewatch will be taking the next couple of weeks off for the holiday season. Thanks to all of you who’ve been joining me on this journey down the long road that leads from there to here, and I hope you have a lovely and safe holiday and new year. We’ll be back on the 3rd of January with “The Andorian Incident.”
Keith R.A. DeCandido is one of the many author guests at DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention, this coming weekend at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. Click here for his full schedule.
Two mysterious disappearances, and both from the 1930s United States. Trek as usual. :-)
It is strange that there was no visit between the original expedition and Enterprise. Okay, sending a rescue mission that will arrive 9 years after the disaster might be called impractical. But no follow-up colony mission? North Carolina wasn’t abandoned because Roanoke went bust. And how long would that flight have taken a decade before Enterprise?
Regarding immature species, rushing into a first contact (or so they thought) with drawn weapons? There is something to be said for the Vulcan approach.
I agree that this is a mix of decent ideas and major conceptual flaws. For me, the biggest problem is the claim that Earth’s first extrasolar colony is 20 light years away. Haven’t these writers ever heard of Alpha Centauri? Closest star to Sol, only four and a third light years? The system Zefram Cochrane was famous for traveling to? Established in previous Trek to have several inhabited planets, asserted in apocrypha to be a founding member world of the Federation? Why the hell wouldn’t the first colony have been there? It drove me crazy.
I handwaved it in one of my novels by establishing that the planets of Alpha Centauri were less than ideal for settlement — I think I went with the idea that they’re subject to heavy bombardment due to Proxima Centauri’s disruption of the binary’s cometary belt, so the colonists went for the more distant but safer Terra Nova first — which made the fate of that colony rather ironic.
Not wanting another 200 colonists to be sent *to your planet* also seems spectacularly unreasonable. I mean, planets are… big. And the colonists don’t seem to have any kind of anti-aircraft weaponry and their ship was taken apart to make the settlement, so what stopped Earth from just… sending another ship and having it land a little bit away?
Also yea, Archer maybe you could have offered to stay in Reed’s place? I mean, the guy has a bullet in his leg, maybe don’t just assume that he’ll be fine in the gross disgusting cave while you go back to the ship? At least *suggest* swapping Reed out with someone who isn’t injured and at risk of getting sepsis.
I agree that this was mostly a blah episode, and also agree that one of the few things I really liked about it was the attempt to portray how language might gradually change among an isolated people to fit their circumstances.
I actually think this might be my favourite episode of the season thus far – one will not argue it’s objectively the Best, but it’s nice to see the crew (and the local population) handle what amounts to a very fraught First Contact with considerable grace; two branches of the Human Family Tree managing to avoid a long drop as they climb down from that first, rather unfortunate encounter.
One should also admit that episodes giving T’Pol a chance to show off her noteworthy “Vulcans 1, Humans 0, emotions nil (honest!)” face are very hard for me to dislike.
@1. o.m. My guess is that the Terra Nova expedition was a very public (and possibly very expensive) failure, it’s not impossible that United Earth put a moratorium on interstellar colonies for a fairly lengthy period afterward; I’m not certain, but aren’t most of the United Earth colonies mentioned in the series situated on the other planets in our Solar system?
In any case, one can imagine the U.E. Space Programme focussing on building up it’s deep space capacity without risking an expedition to Terra Nova, on the grounds that a disastrous failure there – either due to some unknown deadly phenomena or a colonial population that wanted nothing to do with the Mother World – could conceivably have a deeply adverse impact on funding & popular support for the very raw Starfleet.
@2. Christopher L. Bennett: When it comes to Alpha Centauri, I’m fond of the old RPG* notion that the star system was host to a population of extraterrestrial humans even before Zephram Cochrane showed up – it’s a very STAR TREK touch to have our nearest interstellar neighbour settled by Humans long before Earthlings made it off Mother Earth, while also making it easier to understand why Earth’s first attempt at an interstellar colony was sited on Nova Terra Terra Nova (Not to mention this allows us to weasel out of questions like “Well if Centaurans are so blamed important, why haven’t we seen one?” by crying “You have, but they look just like us!”).
*I think it was FASA that first suggested this notion, but Last Unicorn games certainly ran with the idea.
@3. wildfyrewarning: – Insert American Revolution joke here –
British witticisms about ‘unreasonable colonists’ aside, I’d suggest we know too little about the political situation in the 2080s/2090s to call any reluctance to send further colony boats wholly unreasonable – especially given that this would have been happening less than a generation after First Contact, when Earth was almost certainly still in recovery from the Post-Atomic Horror (It’s not impossible that United Earth was still a work in progress at this point, with feelings running high enough across the planet that an effort to ‘force’ further colonists onto Terra Nova would have reopened old wounds).
Politics aside, a second expedition may well have been too expensive for the risk of such a venture to be supportable in the absence of a friendly, pre-established colony waiting to offer advice & assistance (I’m suggest Scotland’s disastrous Darien scheme as a painful example of what happens when a colony scheme you can barely afford and can’t really support goes horribly wrong, but there are many others).
I’m not a fan of this one and agree with the already mentioned frustrations which I share – namely why the first colony was so far out, why the Vulcans weren’t asked to assist or why Enterprise wasn’t sent straight there.
I feel the pre-show Earth/Starfleet history gets a bit reconned later in the series but as an example we learn Earth and Denobula had a joint venture at Cold Station 12 for years – makes you wonder could they not have asked the Denobulans for help if not the Vulcans? Also one of Starfleet’s Warp 2 ships could have already made the trip in far less time.
@5The show will reveal several established Earth colonies away from Sol – Alpha Centauri, Vega Colony and Proxima Colony are thre that I can remember off top of my head.
I don’t remember this one either. Sounds like the first season doldrums continues.
@5/ED: “When it comes to Alpha Centauri, I’m fond of the old RPG* notion that the star system was host to a population of extraterrestrial humans even before Zephram Cochrane showed up – it’s a very STAR TREK touch to have our nearest interstellar neighbour settled by Humans long before Earthlings made it off Mother Earth”
Whereas I’ve always loathed that idea. For one thing, it arises from a misunderstanding — people thinking that the line “Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri” in “Metamorphosis” meant he was born there, even though the rest of the episode clearly establishes him as an Earth human. (The outline for the episode clarifies that he was famous for leading the first expedition to Alpha Centauri, so he’s “of” it in the sense that T.E. Lawrence was “of Arabia.”) Also, it’s needlessly overcomplicated and contrived. Either you need improbably humanlike aliens coincidentally close to us, or you need yet another invocation of the hackneyed trope of aliens abducting and resettling humans. I mean, it doesn’t make sense. If the nearest world to ours had been settled by alien-transplanted humans, why was the crew so surprised by running into transplanted Native Americans in “The Paradise Syndrome”?
” *I think it was FASA that first suggested this notion, but Last Unicorn games certainly ran with the idea. “
It predates FASA. The 1980 Star Trek Maps is the earliest reference to it that I’m aware of.
I completely forgot this episode
I do now remember I was living in Europe in 2001 and I watched the first season with a good friend by illegally downloading the episodes via modem. Took hours … nearly all day … to download and episode and then we’d get together and have dinner and watch. That could explain some of my fondness for Enterprise.
Still, though, my impression of Enterprise is so much better than Voyager. I do think Enterprise gets better than it’s first season.
This one really just seemed to exemplify the issues with the early first season. Solid plotting and general concept, but no spark or execution. That said, Archer yelling for the Novan to hand him the phase pistol at the end became an iconic line in our house in the worst way possible. So cheesy and predictable that we quoted it for weeks.
As an aside regarding Reed’s injury, it drives me nuts that on TV and in movies that removing the bullet solves everything. It’s the damage the bullet causes not the bullet itself that kills the person. Often times, trauma surgeons will leave the bullet where it is; it’s repairing the damaged organs, blood vessels, etc., that’s required in order to save the person’s life.
@10 your comment about Archer and the phase pistol reminds me of something else about this episode that is a running issue with me in anything with Scott Bakula in it. I try to be a fan,, but there’s something about his acting delivery that just grates on me at times. Like when he’s starting to figure out some of the language phrasing of the Terra Novans, when he uses their terminology you can almost see the air quotes when he says “underside”, for example. He slows down, hesitates, and says it in a completely different inflection just so he knows that we know that he knows their lingo now. Lol
@12 – Haha, yeah. I could never get into Archer for the same reason. OTOH, I felt the same way about Avery Brooks, but enjoyed him alot more on my recent re-watch.
Neal: Good point, although your point helps explain why Phlox was okay leaving him there, since we saw him treat the wound. Still, the risk of infection is a pretty hefty one, given the environment…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@13. :) Maybe I should give DS9 another try then, because Avery Brooks was a main reason that series was such a struggle for me at times. His weird way of smiling or laughing maniacally for no particular reason, or over-emoting at the wrong times, just very strange.
@12, 13, 15: I’ve also found Bakula’s line delivery to be unnatural and laughable. He also generally comes across as annoyed as his default mood. I don’t think I mind him as much by the 3rd season because he’s at least acting fond of T’Pol by then and his angry demeanor fits the whole season war-arc.
Regarding Avery Brooks – he also gives a very unique line delivery that I can understand can put some people off by its quirkiness. However, I just love the deep bass of his voice, he has an imposing physical presence, and he has that lethal stare down, all of which makes him a very convincing leader and station commander/captain. I’ve read that Sisko is the captain most cited by U.S. armed forces members as being the most true-to-life type military commander. And beyond the strong captain vibe Avery projects, it contrasts wonderfully with his more tender moments played against his character’s son, Jake, and he plays that wonderfully and convincingly as well.
But that’s not exactly what happened here. Earth was ready and willing to send another ship, and had started building one (so apparently money/ resources on Earth weren’t the issue). It was specifically the colonists who didn’t want their population increased by a mere 200 more people on the same planet as them. That’s nuts.
As a Trekkie in the Army- I agree. Sisko is the only one of the Commanders/Captains I would actually want to have in charge of a unit I was in.
@11/neal: “As an aside regarding Reed’s injury, it drives me nuts that on TV and in movies that removing the bullet solves everything. It’s the damage the bullet causes not the bullet itself that kills the person.”
The same way that if a character’s stopped heart is restarted with a defibrillator (which is not how those work), it will somehow magically cure whatever injuries caused it to stop beating in the first place.
On the conversation about actors’ line deliveries, I love Avery Brooks’s theatrical, almost musical delivery, but Bakula’s… slow… speech… pattern makes me wonder why anyone still makes fun of William Shatner for his substantially less frequent pauses.
Before anything else, please allow me to wish you Happy Holidays krad and thank you for all your efforts to roll out the grand tapestry of STAR TREK before us! (-:
@18. ChristopherLBennett: Presumably they still tease Mr Shatner over his diction because James T. Kirk is objectively RAD AS HELL, so the man playing him needs a little “Remember thou art a man” in the same way a Roman General enjoying his triumph needed a little stick-pin to the ego (just to keep things within reasonable limits), while making fun of Mr Scott Bakula for the way he played Captain John would be kicking a man when he’s down.
@17. wildfyrewarning: Nine years of in-flight meals would have wrecked anyone’s sanity … (-;
On a more serious note, one would like to know how long it took transmissions from Earth to reach Nova Terra and vice versa; it’s not impossible that transmission lag might have led to some rather painful (possibly even dangerous) misunderstandings between the two populations.
It’s equally possible that having a whole planet all to themselves might rather have gone to the Conestoga families’ collective head – heaven knowns, emigrant families can become mightily possessive mighty quickly.
Also, having resources sufficient for another ship doesn’t necessarily mean United Earth can afford to send that ship where it won’t be welcome (Politically-speaking).
@14. krad & 3. wildfyrewarning: For my money the more logical crewman to leave behind would have been Ensign Mayweather (The captain being demonstrably able to fly the shuttlepod, the ensign being unwounded and more experienced than most Enterprise crewmen in dealing with unknown cultures from a position of relative weakness) – on the other hand I trust Doctor Phlox’s professional opinion and see no reason for Captain Archer not to do so.
@8. Christopher L. Bennett: Given STAR TREK is a whole Galaxy of improbably human-like aliens, I’m not loathe to imagine Alpha Centuauri acquiring a population of same; I do, however, respect your right to hold the opposite opinion. (-:
@6. sharev: Thank You most kindly for pointing out the various United Earth interstellar colonies. (-:
It’s not impossible that United Earth may have been reluctant to ask for a Denobulan ship for the same reason they were reluctant to involve the Vulcans – they didn’t want to parade Earth’s failure before an alien species (nor seem utterly dependent on an extraterrestrial power).
Now this is undoubtedly a bad reason, but it’s a logical reason; it’s also possible that, by the time Earth struck up a working relationship with the Denobulans, Terra Nova was ancient history and U.E.’s interest lay in other directions (The latter factor may also explain the failure to send a Warp 2 ship in the direction of Terra Nova, once those became available).
N.B. It has occurred to me that the Terra Novans may have taken to wearing face paint as an elaboration on some vague memory of their grandparent’s parents applying sunscreen – remembering only that it was meant to protect against the sun and not that it was an ointment, rather than a magic potion, the Novans may have gotten into the habit of applying a layer of ‘screen’ whenever they went to the surface, which gradually evolved into the more elaborate patterns we see in this episode.
My only regret is that these patterns are not glow-in-the-dark, since this would have given them a more obviously practical use in the underworld of Terra Nova.
I agree about the use of language in this episode. It’s a more difficult task than it appears, but they managed to introduce idioms not used in 21st century English, while simultaneously making those idioms wholly transparent to a 21st century viewer.
Other than that, though, this episode just kind of sits there. I would also have preferred something indicating the establishment of some sort of semi-diplomatic relationship with the Novans. I’m not saying they should be forcibly relocated or anything, but the ideal happy ending would be the Novans being open to interacting with Earth humans, if only on their own terms. Maybe check up on them every few years? (I wonder if the Xindi knew about them in the alternate future where they destroy humanity?)
@19/ED: “Given STAR TREK is a whole Galaxy of improbably human-like aliens, I’m not loathe to imagine Alpha Centuauri acquiring a population of same; I do, however, respect your right to hold the opposite opinion. (-:”
It’s a matter of proximity and probability. Alpha Centauri isn’t just another star, it’s the closest star system to ours. The probability of finding something like that on your very first try is much lower than the probability of finding it in general. By analogy, there are hundreds of Bennetts in Cincinnati, so it wouldn’t be too great a coincidence to run into one out there in the city somewhere, but it would be a huge coincidence if one of them randomly happened to be my next-door neighbor.
And I’ve already spelled out my problem with the transplanted-humans alternative. But another problem I have with both options is that it just makes it too easy. Finding other intelligent life in the galaxy is a major achievement. Having it right next door is just too convenient. It feels contrived.
Not to mention that we’ve very rarely heard Alpha or Proxima Centauri mentioned in canon. If we did have sentient neighbors that close, surely they’d be important enough to warrant being mentioned as frequently as the Vulcans or Andorians. It just doesn’t fit.
Seeing how many other aliens there are that appear exactly like Humans, it’s not surprising to me that the Alpha Centaurians are rarely mentioned. It’s like Canada. In many ways, the country that has a culture most like America but one that is rarely mentioned in American media compared to other countries. It’s just that the Centaurians weren’t different enough to hold Earth’s interest compared to the more alien races. Now those were more interesting.
I recall reading one of the earlier Trek novels that said that Centaurians used fibre optics for all their communications instead of radio or TV signals that were broadcast, making the planet very quiet in radio frequencies. Or something to that effect.
The big surprise in The Paradise Syndrome was that the inhabitants obviously didn’t have technology that would permit an interstellar journey but that there was this big, honking monolith there. Strangely, such a monolith was already known to exist on one of the moons of Andoria as seen in DSC.
“If I can’t make first contact with other humans, I don’t have any business being out here.”
Rewatching, it’s struck me just how many of these early episodes live up to the philosophy of peaceful exploration and contact. Sure, there’s usually some action thrown in, but for the most part, there’s no evil plan to expose or enemy to defeat, just different people needing to find common ground and work together. (Even in “Fight or Flight”, where there was an enemy to defeat, the solution hinged on doing that.)
So, the fact that “Abandoned Earth colony with a secret” is a bit of a stock Star Trek plot doesn’t really matter. Not only are we seeing it fresh, from the first people out here, but the mystery almost takes second place to the crew having to convince a group of frightened and suspicious people to trust them. Archer seems to be casting off the more obnoxious traits of the first few episodes, but it’s not being done at the expense of T’Pol. There’s a brilliant scene which starts off seeming like T’Pol giving a brutally logical assessment of the situation, only to slowly reveal that she’s taking Archer’s plan to its logical conclusion in order to show him he needs to come up with a better plan. To his credit, he pretty much immediately does, and him surrendering to the Novans in order to help Reed is another great moment. As too is Reed’s desperate attempt at small talk with his guard, and the beautiful musical piece by the Novans, which doesn’t add much in plot terms but underlines that they have built a life for themselves on the planet. And yes, another use of not-quite-correct terminology to underline cultural differences.
The great Erick Avari is also one of, I believe, only two actors to be in both the film and series of Stargate as the same character. First time Tucker’s left in command of the ship. Mayweather gets to eat at the captain’s table, which is interesting given that they make a big deal about the more senior Reed being invited there for the first time in Season 2. I meant to look out for when Phlox’s species was first mentioned by name: Thanks for doing it for me, Krad!
This is where I stopped watching Enterprise when it was first on. I grade all of the shows after DS9 on a curve because DS9 was so amazing, even when it is really difficult to do. For example, where people were discussing Broken Bow and how it was a great pilot, I did not point out that in the DS9 pilot, Sisko makes successful first contact with an entirely new form of life that doesn’t even process Time the same way we do through the concepts of baseball while simultaneously finding therapy and processing the death of his wife, and MEANWHILE our former terrorist slash freedom fighter is staking her people’s claim to the origin of their religion which is also suddenly the most strategic point in the quadrant by facing down her ultimate monster with two photon torpedoes and a bluff that could probably deflect phasers by itself. I very carefully did not mention any of that in that comment section.
This episode, Terra Nova… at the end I really felt like this show did not deserve my eyeballs. I did not get much from Voyager, but I didn’t feel like that. This was new. It’s like… you want to do a show that fills in an open spot in your franchise timeline? Great! Fill it! How do you set your show between the most popular TNG movie and the TOS that started it all, and not even care to have an outline over what happened? How do you get to Episode 6 and say, “Oh yeah, remember that colony we never mentioned? Let’s take a look! Might be good for a lark.” Episodic TV can be great! However, when the whole point of your show is that it fits into a timeline, have some basic care for your concept and Create A Timeline!
Enterprise could have been so great, because it is close enough to these Bad Old Days on Earth that we watching should be able to really relate to common experience, but it can have that trademark Star Trek optimism which we love! All it takes is the tiniest bit of planning.
(I liked Season 4 when I watched it years later on Netflix.)
Hi, I’m going to be quite sincere: although the premise of rewatching episodes seems good the task should be given to someone that would enjoy rewatching them without so many prejudice and preconception. I know that your first impression, obviously negative, is imprinted in your memory before revisiting each episode to get a second impression of it but reading your negative reviews turns out to be boring and predictable. It is like you have prepared yourself to revalidate the first impression with what you think are smart remarks that aim to diminish any possibility for someone to enjoy such episode. My experience is different in comparison to yours. I didn’t watch the show when it first aired and watching it now, two decades later, has been quite satisfying. I see it for what it is – a fiction, a fantasy. It has less imperfections, inconsistencies and incoherence than many other shows in the franchise.
The decision that the culture of the castaways that have horribly suffered due to the loss of technology in three generations is some of the most colonialist condescending attitude in a show that has a long history of it. They are not being treated as human beings, they’re being treated as lab specimens.
T’Pol: And what? Their children will grow up with teachers and hamburgers?
Captain Archer: Uh. YEAH? Is that bad?
Monica: I went into the Voyager Rewatch having disliked the show when I first saw it, and wound up enjoying it much more the second time around and finding a lot of good in it. I’m hoping for a repeat with Enterprise, but these first few episodes have been pretty terrible. I’m hoping it’ll get better….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Perhaps this is a bit on the nose — but as mysteries they could have mentioned go: the ‘Lost Colony’ of Roanoke (just half an hour’s drive, by the way, from the Kill Devil Hills of Wright Brothers fame!). It was established in 1587; when the British returned in 1590, it was abandoned — structures, but no colonists or bodies. The text ‘Croatoan’ was the only hint left behind, and various theories have been tossed around over the previous 400 years. While not conclusive, more recent research has leaned in the direction that the colonists abandoned the settlement and joined the local Native population.
As Earthbound mysteries go, that parallels the ‘Terra Nova’ story better (although certainly not identically) than any of the examples cited. Obviously there weren’t any local native humanoids; instead, the Novans literally disappeared into the local nature.
This isn’t exactly an obscure bit of history. If the writers knew the story, they ought to have mentioned it. Or, after hitting upon the idea, a little research would have gone a long way. In any case: as writing goes, it would have offered a far more focused angle for the story — and a far better opportunity for a Trek story to be ‘about us’.
So, i regard the episode as a missed opportunity. Too bad, as there’s much to like about the premise.
@24: Can I be blunt? I think “Broken Bow” is a much better pilot than “Emissary”. The first half of “Emissary” is great, but the second half is a mess, with too much going on, pacing problems and very little resolution for any of the problems set up in the first half. The station under attack from Cardassians was pretty much treated as a secondary problem, yet it’s a lot more interesting than the endless repetitive scenes of Sisko in a wide void being constantly asked “What is this?” (And it probably depends on how much you like baseball.) Yet it seems like Sisko gets all the focus and screen-time, with the “Back on the station” stuff treated as an after-thought to shoehorn some action into a very wordy script. Pretty much everything seems to get resolved off-screen or not resolved at all. They make a big deal about how the aliens find the intrusion of corporeal entities in the wormhole intrusive and want to keep them out, then after Sisko cries about his dead wife in front of them, suddenly both he and the stranded Cardassian ship end up back in the Alpha Quadrant and using the wormhole is totally fine. They make a big deal about the Cardassians having stolen nearly all the Bajoran orbs, yet not only is this never really followed up on but later episodes like “Prophet Motive” and “Trials and Tribble-ations” seem to completely forget that the orbs are supposed to be in Cardassian laboratories being studied and has them scattered around the quadrant like plot coupons. The Cardassians supposedly want control of the wormhole, yet after finding it, they just give up because that’s what the script says, when all that’s standing in their way is an unarmed space station and a runabout.
In the Enterprise pilot, Archer makes the first stumbling steps into humans joining an interstellar community by staying true to his convictions and insisting on returning an injured alien to his people against insurmountable odds, in the process stumbling across a conflict spanning the whole of time that defies his comprehension, while the science officer foisted on him begins to realise the values of working together and realises that by committing herself to following his emotional and illogical goals she can actually make them work. (And yes, it also introduces a lot of things which are never properly followed up on.)
I’m not saying that Enterprise is better than DS9 on average, but you really picked the wrong example for me there.
I do agree that a lot of the early Enterprise episodes are paint-by-numbers filler, but then that’s true of the early episodes of DS9, and indeed virtually every Star Trek spin-off of the Berman era. I can see the flaws of these episodes, but I can also see a seed of potential in them, and there’s perhaps value in using a series of stock Star Trek plots to illuminate your characters and give the audience a good idea of where everyone stands.
@25/Monica: It’s totally unfair to assume that anyone who had a negative impression of a show the first time around must be too “prejudiced” to give it a fair shot on a revisit. Heck, I didn’t like ENT much the first time through, but I gained a greater appreciation of it when I rewatched it. And there are other things I liked the first time through but saw more flaws in when I revisited them (e.g. season 1 of 1988’s War of the Worlds: The Series, which I remembered somewhat fondly but turned out to be far, far worse than I recalled). After all, the whole point of taking a second look at something is to reconsider your first impressions.
Besides, you contradict yourself when you say the task should’ve gone to someone who’d enjoy rewatching. If anyone with a negative first impression is “too prejudiced,” doesn’t it logically follow that anyone with a positive first impression would also be too prejudiced in the other direction? You can’t have it both ways.
Re Vulcans not being sent to check out Terra Nova. Tucker’s flippant reason aside, all people on Earth know is that relations with the colony broke down and then they stopped responding to messages. That could well have been by choice. There’s a difference between asking an (uneasy) ally to help out in a known humanitarian crisis and asking them to satisfy your curiosity and potentially get caught up in an internal dispute. We learn later in the episode that the more militant colonists had threatened to fire on any ships that approached: Earth colonists opening fire on a Vulcan ship would have been embarrassing to say the least. So it makes political sense for Earth to handle the matter internally until presented with firm evidence that assistance is needed.
I always conflate this episode with Strange New World in my memory. It seemed a bit of a mistake to have two ‘running around in dark caves’ so early in the show’s run.
I generally rather like Enterprise, but the first few episodes aren’t that great. I wouldn’t accuse anyone of being prejudiced for not enjoying it so far. I consider the next episode, “The Andorian Incident”, to be the first halfway decent one, and the following episode, “Breaking the Ice”, to be the first good one.
@20. Vulpes: It would most definitely have been nice to get a little throwaway line or two in later seasons suggesting that the Novans are doing well in their new caves and are at least willing to keep an open mind where Earthlings are concerned; I do wonder though if Starfleet would send a follow-up mission to check in on the Novans during the Xindi Crisis or the Earth-Romulan War? (On the one hand United Earth would want to extend protection to their distant cousins, but on the other hand sending a full-blown mission to Terra Nova might well paint that planet with a set of crosshairs – precipitating the very tragedy that mission was intended to avert).
@21. Christopher L. Bennett: You make very fair points and (as noted) I’m perfectly willing to accept your opinion on things; on the other hand STAR TREK has a long history of quite casually dropping new ideas, planets & species into the mix without worrying about how they fit into what went before, so absence of evidence cannot entirely be taken as evidence of absence! (-:
Having said that I really do like the notion of United Earth having to deal with a pre-existing population of humanoids even in the very closest star system to their own – since this makes a nice tonic for those who might otherwise get the notion that the Stars are just there, waiting to be caught up by the Hand of Man (also because it amuses me to imagine Human & Centauran scholars spending the next few centuries arguing back and forth over which planet is the actual Mother World of Humanity; STAR TREK being STAR TREK, there’s absolutely no guarantee Earth is the birth-world of humanity!).
@23. cap-mjb: You have just summed up exactly why I like this episode, far more elegantly than I even came close to doing! (The Novans may look outlandish and they lack Starfleet technology, but they’re not treated as stupid or foolishly hostile; it’s also a key plot point of the episode that Our Heroes are required to convince the Novans, rather than compel them to act outside their comfort zone).
@24. BrianDolan: To each their own! (I do wonder if STAR TREK exhaustion might have played some role in your decision to call it a day with Terra Nova, though one must admit that there hasn’t been anything MUST WATCH in the episodes thus far – on the other hand I’m finding it genuinely pleasurable to watch a show that doesn’t really worry if you haven’t seen all the episodes before it and doesn’t really demand you watch the ones after it, given tightly serialised storytelling has become so much the norm that even James Bond, past master of the done-in-one, has bought into it*).
*I rather liked NO TIME TO DIE, but it did have a rather bad habit of reminding us that SPECTRE (the film) was supposed to be IMPORTANT to a degree that I found quite thoroughly disagreeable (Also, no lie, I’m a little disappointed that Baron Samedi doesn’t show up to collect James Bond’s soul; yes, I know that sort of nod to LIVE & LET DIE is madly impractical so far as EON are concerned, but you’d think at least one Fan Artist would pick up on the possibility).
@26. C.T. Phipps: Please allow me to apologise if I seem obtuse, but could you please clarify what you mean?
I believe you to be suggesting that, while intending to show respect for the Terra Novan’s right to self-determination, the senior officers of NX-01 come across as having actually condescended to them from an Olympian height (as though the Novans were subjects in a lab, rather than flesh-and-blood individuals); might one please ask if this is the correct interpretation?
If so, then one can only reply “Stolen Generation” (In other words, FORCING integration has been at the root of some of the ugliest crimes against Humanity and it’s a very, very good idea and greatly to his credit that Captain Archer refuses to pursue that option).
@27. krad: Well I’m definitely having fun sharing this watch-through with you, so I most definitely hope you’ll be able to enjoy it yourself in future episodes. (-:
One must admit to having an unsporting advantage, though – I never disliked ENTERPRISE to begin with!
@31. cap-mjb: This is an excellent point and I’m quite embarrassed not to have brought it up myself; it bears repeating out that, at the time of the Terra Nova expedition, Vulcan would have been even more a foreign and an alien power than was the case in the 2150s, hence a certain unwillingness to go cap in hand unless compelled by a clear emergency (Remember that so far as Earth knew, Terra Nova only went silent, it didn’t get caught off mid-transmission), especially given that the Terra Nova expedition was almost certainly chartered with the intention of showing that while Earth was grateful for Vulcan help, Humanity was not a hopeless dependent.
As to why Humanity didn’t ask for help from the Denobulans instead, there’s no guarantee that Earth was even in contact with Denobula at this point in time, much less that relations with them were friendly enough for them to be trusted to handle the whole affair (Remember, Terra Nova was settled only a generation after First Contact – the Vulcans may well have been the only game in town when it came to Earth asking for help from an ally).
@32. SamB: It’s a fair cop! (Out of curiosity, where would you have put the two ‘cave in’ episodes, were you seeking to work out a watch list?). (-;
@34/ED: “also because it amuses me to imagine Human & Centauran scholars spending the next few centuries arguing back and forth over which planet is the actual Mother World of Humanity; STAR TREK being STAR TREK, there’s absolutely no guarantee Earth is the birth-world of humanity!”
Actually, that’s one sci-fi cliche that Trek mercifully avoided. In “Return of Tomorrow,” Sargon raised the possibility that his people might have been humanity’s ancestors, but Anne Mulhall shut that down immediately, saying that studies had shown that life on Earth evolved independently. I’m guessing that the writers of “Return” intended to use the transplantation cliche but Kellam DeForest’s researchers saved them from making that mistake. The notion that humans didn’t evolve on Earth is easily disproven by our close genetic relationship to all the other life forms on Earth; even plants have more than 50% of their DNA in common with humans. Contrary to many, many really ignorant sci-fi stories, it would be quite easy to tell the difference between a species’ home planet and a species they were transplanted to just by studying the native life’s genetics and the fossil record. The scientific evidence would leave no room for ambiguity; the only people who might deny that evidence and claim Alf Cen as the birthworld would be fanatics, fools, and politicians exploiting their folly (like the people on Earth who deny evolution or the validity of vaccination).
“The Chase” did establish that ancient aliens did seed life on Earth, but it sensibly put the seeding four billion years ago, so that they were responsible for starting all life on Earth, not just humans.
@31 & @34 – I do agree with the thoughts around not wanting to ask Vulcans for help at the time given the nature of last contact with the colony. It just seems to me that in the end Earth ended up not really being bothered to find out even as years went by, Starfleet developed prior to the launch of the NX-01 and other alien races were encountered and indeed partnered with – at least the Denobulans as we will learn. Earth could have even sent a warp probe like Friendship 1 to investigate which may have had the added benefit of appearing less hostile.
In the end it felt like Starfleet thought, we have a warp 5 ship now, the planet is nearby to the assigned course so why not take a look – rather than i being a priority to establish what had happened to the colony.
@35. Christopher L. Bennett: On a scientific level, I most definitely do not believe that Humanity’s ancestors evolved anywhere but Earth; on a storytelling level there’s a certain pleasure to be had from subverting any assumption that Earthling humans are in the same position relative to the rest of Humanity that certain Britons feel themselves to be in relative to the rest of the English-speaking world (As with every other cliche in the books, it’s an idea that has it’s uses even after long years of over-familiarity).
@37/ED: I don’t follow the analogy. If we’re talking about the human origin world vis-a-vis colonies elsewhere, surely the comparison would be to Africa, where we evolved, rather than the UK. It’s a scientific question, not a political or ideological one.
I have a very low tolerance for science fiction stories that try to completely rewrite human (pre)history. I guess at some level I resent the implication, whether intended or not, that the evolutionary and cultural history of actual humans isn’t interesting and needs to be punched up.
@36. sharev: I suspect that simple institutional inertia helps explain the lack of follow-up where Terra Nova was concerned; the United Earth government falling into a self-perpetuating cycle where the initial reluctance to trigger any kind of International controversy or Interstellar incident slowly ground on into an ongoing policy of “letting sleeping dogs lie” (If this were not STAR TREK one would suspect a fear reminding the general public that Terra Nova existed just in time for a follow-up expedition to reveal that it had, in fact, turned out a disaster and not merely a mystery … ).
@38. Christopher L. Bennett: Since I was referring more to the potentially-negative consequences of ‘Earth First’ thinking, one preferred to evoke a questionable sense of Superiority based on slightly shoddy thinking, rather than the invocation of a a plain scientific fact (Hence my invocation of Britons condescending to nations like the United States or Australia, rather than Great-Grandmother Africa).
Though Heaven knows, scientific fact (and scientific theories) have been exploited by some to the detriment of others often enough over the longue durée; thankfully it’s not a tendency STAR TREK seems to have much time for.
@40 Makes sense. I’m just dwelling too much on it as it was a plot point that bugged me for so long. Thinking about it we did see in TNG long lost colonies being rediscovered years later
@41/ED: “Since I was referring more to the potentially-negative consequences of ‘Earth First’ thinking, one preferred to evoke a questionable sense of Superiority based on slightly shoddy thinking, rather than the invocation of a a plain scientific fact”
But it is a scientific fact that humans evolved on Earth first. It makes no sense to compare that to an ideological or political doctrine. Someone might corrupt that fact into an excuse to support a political doctrine of Earth superiority, but trying to deny or demonize the scientific reality to counter an ideology that abuses it would be every bit as corrupt. There can be no honest or functional political, social, or moral stance without the acceptance of objective reality.
You realize that you’re talking about a show that had a spacefaring race of dinosaurs that evolved on Earth and later settled on the far side of the galaxy that were totally unknown until Voyager made contact with them, right? Scientific accuracy is hardly one of Treks strong points. Sure, it doesn’t have giant talking vegetables but it’s not exactly that far removed from them scientifically speaking.
@44 The animated show had giant talking plants!
@44/kkozoriz: Actually the possibility of a dinosaur civilization lost to the fossil record can’t be entirely ruled out, because the fossil record is far more fragmentary than most people realize.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industrial-prehuman-civilization-have-existed-on-earth-before-ours/
And yes, you can cherry-pick individual examples of bad science in Trek, but it’s a logical fallacy to equate general argument with specific argument. As I said, the “life here began out there” trope is one dumb sci-fi idea that Star Trek mercifully did not fall prey to, even though it has its share of others.
I’ve always disliked the premise of the episode. A small group of a-hole colonists land on a perfect Earth-like plantent and then threaten to murder any more hunans who dare come to “their” planet soon after landing there.
Then these same idiots, clearly not able to do math, actually accuse Earth of trying to murder them when natural meteors come down on them. Except how could it be Earth’s doing, it takes years to get there? The funny part is, even if it was Earth, they deserved it. The Novans had become terrorists holding a whole damn planet hostage.
The funny things is the Novans got all bitchy and selfish claiming autonomy and self-sufficiency, and their attitude ended up making them far less self-sufficient as now they needed Earth to come save them.
@47. Joshua: Please note that the Novans we see in this episode are very definitely not the ones who protested the sending of a second colony ship – it’s explicitly noted in the episode that the first generation of settlers died out after the impact event and that only survivors were preadolescents (Hence the loss of most high technology), who are unlikely to have had the clearest understanding of what caused all this mess.
Now consider that most of those child survivors are dead by the time NX-01 shows up and that their children & grandchildren have been raised with an oral history based on a child’s partial understanding of horror, confusion & calamity … well, it’s not surprising that the Novan understanding of what went before is very flawed.
It also bears pointing out that the Novans are used to being the only sapient life on their planet and that (from their perspective) the first encounter with ‘Humans’ involved one of their own being chased home by an armed stranger – the Novans may not have retained much high technology, but guns they know – it’s perhaps unsurprising they reacted with a certain amount of panic.
Nonetheless, once given an opportunity to cool down, they negotiate in good faith and as clear-headedly as the crew of NX-01 (within the limits of their own understanding of the situation); so, in brief, I believe that your characterisation of the Novans as ‘terrorists’ from first to last in quite, quite inaccurate.
@46 – And yet the idea that billions of years ago the first sentient species in our galaxy seeded DNA on planets that just happened to line up along a double helix (Look, it’s a clue) and all the planets developed humanoid lifeforms that came to be spacefaring at the same time (galactic time speaking) makes perfect sense? Sorry, but the DNA of creatures that swam in scum puddles in the distant past could not have developed essentially identical lifeforms due to some ancient code.
Their DNA also led to oak trees and whales and moss and mushrooms and trilobites.
Yet they also managed to create humanoid races that could interbreed? Himans can’t interbreed with chimps amd they’re our closest, genetic relatives.
And let’s not get into the idea that people can evolve into salamanders or devolve into spiders.
In comparison to those, “Life here began out there” looks positively tame in comparison.
I actually don’t like the “ancient humanoids seeded life throughout the galaxy” thing either. I find the prospect of intelligent life evolving many times independently throughout the galaxy much more interesting. I suppose it would be all right as a stand-alone story, but as part of a vast science fiction media franchise that’s supposed to be, at least in abstract terms, about the “real” future of humanity, it just rubs me the wrong way.
@50/Vulpes: I don’t mind the explanation in “The Chase,” because it makes more sense than exactly or near-exactly humanoid species (that can interbreed) evolving independently, and, as I said, because it puts the seeding event 4 billion years ago so that it accounts for all life on Earth. What I hate are the stories postulating that only humans colonized or were seeded here from an alien world, because they ignore the overwhelming evidence of our genetic relationship to the rest of life on Earth.
@51/CLB: Maybe, but (as I’m confident you know) it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution to say that it’s directed toward a predetermined goal. I’m not convinced that “humanoid life evolved a bunch of times because some aliens seeded some of their DNA all over the place billions of years ago” is any more plausible than “because it’s a practical and efficient body plan” or even “it’s a coincidence”. Honestly, I’d like to see more truly alien species in Star Trek, like the Tholians.
@15,@16 – I think few big thing I realized on re-watching it was that the thing that seemed off to me about it was a certain almost stiff, restrained quality. About six episodes in it occurred to me that this was purposeful. Sisko is a man of great, almost uncontrollable passion, in a position where such passion has to restrained. I think, after growing up with Picard’s natural diplomatic demeanor, I never understood the placid facade over a fiery heart of Sisko. Found the character much better after I realized that. Also, I love DS9 always recommend it!
@52/Vulpes: “it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution to say that it’s directed toward a predetermined goal.”
Naturally, yes. So the only way you could get the same results on different worlds is with some kind of programming guiding it, built into the DNA. And that’s what was proposed in “The Chase” — it’s directed specifically because it isn’t natural evolution. So it’s not a misunderstanding. The writers clearly understood that evolution would have to be artificially interfered with in some way in order to get such an unnatural result.
“I’m not convinced that “humanoid life evolved a bunch of times because some aliens seeded some of their DNA all over the place billions of years ago” is any more plausible than “because it’s a practical and efficient body plan””
That’s a crappy explanation. Just because bipedalism might be an efficient body plan doesn’t mean that all bipeds would be shaped so exactly the same that they could all wear clothes bought off the rack at an Earth department store. There are other bipedal species on Earth that come in a wide variety of shapes — theropod dinosaurs and iguanodons, birds, kangaroos, indrid lemurs. There are multiple orders of life that have independently invented flight, and all their wings look radically different. Parallel evolution does not mean identical duplication. That’s pushing it way too far.
(This page here includes several of the obligately or facultatively bipedal aliens I’ve designed for my primary SF universe. My guiding principle in creating aliens in my original fiction has always been never to design an alien that could be played by an actor in makeup.)
“or even “it’s a coincidence”. “”
Tantamount to writing a story about a poker player who always gets dealt a royal flush in every hand. Nobody would buy mere coincidence as an explanation there. Even a fanciful explanation (it’s his superpower, or a wizard did it) is preferable to “It just happened, deal with it.”
Look — we’re stuck with the absurdity of humanoid aliens, due to the necessities of production. We have to stipulate to that going in. All we can hope for is an explanation that makes it slightly less absurd, that at least has some in-story logic to it, because there’s no way it can be actually credible in real-world terms. We’re grading on a hell of a curve here.
@54/CLB: The thing is, saying that they “programmed” evolution to produce a humanoid form isn’t really any more plausible than saying everyone just converged to it. If they put their code where the humanoid form is maladaptive, or if it become maladaptive, then all of their jiggery-pokery won’t make it outcompete things that are actually suited to the environment. If they put it where it is adaptive, well, what is it actually doing? So either what they did had no effect, or the humanoid form would have emerged sooner or later anyway. I guess you could argue it creates a bias toward the humanoid form when multiple possibilities are adaptive, but at that point, I feel like the “explanation” is more trouble than it’s worth. Evolution often produces surprising convergences that go beyond similar body plans without any identifiable cause, like the Moorish Idol and certain butterflyfishes, or longclaws and meadowlarks. I’d be happy with assuming that humanoid life is one of those cases.
@55/Vulpes: I already answered that. No, objectively it’s not plausible, because humanoid aliens are not plausible, period. It doesn’t have to be realistically plausible. This is fiction. Of course it falls apart if you dig too closely, just like the logic behind universal translators, say. It’s just a narrative device, an acknowledgment that there is a phenomenon that needs some explanation. Universal translators are nonsense, but they’re better than just having everyone in the universe speak English. They’re a token explanation that gives the superficial illusion of a logical explanation, which is good enough for a work of make-believe.
“Evolution often produces surprising convergences that go beyond similar body plans without any identifiable cause… I’d be happy with assuming that humanoid life is one of those cases.”
I repeat my earlier objection. Coincidence like that might work once, but it’s beyond absurd to postulate that an exact, perfect coincidence has happened thousands of times independently.
But that ignores the fact that there were multiple mass extinctions, some of which almost sterilized the planet. Life had to evolve to suit the new conditions they were facing. And the dinosaurs existed for millions of years, evolving all the time. And then, they got wiped out and the survivors, small mammals, led to us. Are we to believe that the same thing happened almost identically on the other planets? If they missed out on just one of those mass extinctions, and the next step was intelligent humanoids, they should have appeared tens pf millions of years before humans did. And yet Vulcans, Klingons, Cardassians and humans all appeared at almost the exact same second, galactically speaking. Somehow this DNA that was seeded had a timer build in or it was in communications with the other planets to ensure that they all appeared at the same time?
Yeah, totally plausable.
It’s a handwave that has nothing, not a single thing, to do with science.
@56/CLB: I guess the difference is that I feel like convergent evolution already provides the sufficient illusion of plausibility, and throwing in ancient humanoids fiddling with things doesn’t strengthen the illusion enough to be worth the narrative drawbacks. But everyone will put that line in a different place, I suppose. One thing I’d guess we agree on is that we need more nonhumanoid aliens.
Incidentally, it once occurred to me that effective universal translation could be the result of a transcultural interstellar project—a species could decide that whenever they meet a new species and learn their language, they will instruct them to begin future first contacts by broadcasting a description of their language in a specific format, and to do the same for every species they in turn meet, and so on. Eventually, the protocols would spread, and species that had never met before would still know about the protocols and be able to communicate. Not really supported, or even compatible, with the Star Trek canon, though, and it could be a bad idea from a security standpoint.
That sounds like a combination of linguacode and hailing frequencies. Might help in first contact situations but only if both parties were aware of it. I was always amused by the use of hailing frequencies when the Enterprise met someone unknown. How would they know what frequencies to monitor? Ir do they even use radio or subspace for communications? What about lasers or microwaves or gamma waves or who knows what?
Depending on how good their AI is I suppose you could get away with species just transmitting a bunch of movies at each other when they meet and having their AI learn the language from them.
@60/Vulpes: I asserted in one or two of my Trek novels that “hailing frequencies” are actually a superfast handshake/learning protocol between starship computers where they begin with universal mathematical constants and physical laws and build up a translation matrix from there, all in the few seconds while the crew is waiting for a response to the hail.
@61/CLB: That sounds pretty good. I’m also envisioning a real-time annotation system where the viewscreen provides glosses on terms that can’t be translated—e.g. “a targ is a boar-like animal native to the Klingon homeworld”.
@62/Vulpes: In my duology Arachne’s Crime/Arachne’s Exile, the human characters get alien languages translated for them as subtitles in their augmented-reality field of view, sometimes with annotations or alternate word choices provided by their AI (the titular Arachne). I originally wrote it as a vocal translation like in Trek, but then I realized subtitles would be more plausible and distinctive. That way, you could hear the original language clearly, which would help with eventually learning to understand it without subtitles.
@17: I can believe that regarding Sisko and thank you for your service!
@62, 63
One of the things I appreciate in retrospect about the My Teacher is an Alien series is that while the translators were mostly direct-to-brain handwave devices, they did provide multiple simultaneous layers of context- letting the human viewpoint character know not only that what the alien doctor had said literally translated as “I hope I shall never be forced to eat your children,” but also that this was a courtesy parting that shouldn’t be given any more weight than ‘good-bye,’ or ‘farewell.’
If so, then one can only reply “Stolen Generation” (In other words, FORCING integration has been at the root of some of the ugliest crimes against Humanity and it’s a very, very good idea and greatly to his credit that Captain Archer refuses to pursue that option).
I think my rebuttal can be summarized as you missing that the Terra Novans are having the choice DICTATED to them by the white man on the bridge and not the person who has a responsibility to offer them humanitarian aid after a disaster. They are not having their culture stolen, they are being denied it because apparently living in isolation is more important than being allowed medicine and electricity.
It’s evil and vile and basically forcing them onto a reservation.
Archer’s “White Man’s Burden” has no place in Star Trek. Self-determination is a basic human right as should freedom of movement. Archer denies them the chance to move to Earth from a humanitarian disaster because he cloaks it in “protecting them.” Its the kind of rhetoric used to keep away refugees and is against the spirit of Star Trek.
@66: That is absolutely not what happens in the episode. Archer’s first idea is to take them off planet and back to Earth. They refuse. Their choice. Archer initially remains fixated on that as the only alternative to leaving the colonists to die, until T’Pol points out that they consider the planet their home. It’s only then that Archer comes up with the idea of leaving them on the planet but helping them move to an area free of radioactive contamination. Again, the idea is put to them and it’s their choice to accept it.
Do not make the mistake of thinking people lack self-determination just because they choose not to live the way you do.
@67 Completely agree. This dovetails with a similar discussion in the thread about the latest episode of Discovery. Sometimes I’m astonished that people who have spent much of their lives studying and world-building Trek view concepts like justice, morality and self-determination in such inflexible humanocentric terms.
@68/fullyfunctional: I don’t think that’s a fair comparison at all. If you’re referring to my comments in the DSC thread, my whole point is that objective reality matters more than abstract belief — that some things demonstrably don’t work and all the belief in the universe won’t make them effective at achieving what you want. You can believe with every fiber of your being that a square wheel is better than a round one, but it simply won’t be.
My point in the DSC thread is that “sentence even the most minor criminals to the harshest penalty to deter crime” is an invalid idea, because we know from real-world evidence that just threatening people does not work as a deterrent, no matter how much it suits one’s ideology to believe it does. And what cap-mjb is saying here is the same principle — that we know from real-world experience that any well-intentioned attempt to force people to assimilate to your culture will do them more harm than good. It’s not about being ethnocentric. It’s not about beliefs and opinions, because beliefs and opinions do not shape actual objective reality. Some beliefs just plain don’t work, and to cling to them when they’re proven wrong is not cultural autonomy, it’s just stupidity. That’s true of many things that humans believe, so saying that is not “humanocentric.” It’s rationalistic, saying that objective reality outweighs anyone’s subjective beliefs.
You talk about flexibility, but what that means is the willingness to change your views in light of the evidence. It doesn’t just mean being open to other people’s opinions, because not everything in life is exclusively about opinion. It’s not an opinion that wheels need to be round. It’s not an opinion that vaccines work. It’s not an opinion that we landed on the Moon. Every culture, including our own, has beliefs that are simply wrong, and challenging those beliefs is not “disrespecting their culture,” it’s respecting reality.
@69 – But you’re talking about human experience. Making contact with an alien species and expecting that they will line up with your beliefs is simply being racist. It’s their planet. Let them run things as they see fit. Nobody is saying you have to be friends with everyone out there.
Vulcans allow fights to the death over marriage, believe that women are the property of the victor and betroth children as young as 7 years old to each other. Yet Vulcans are held in high esteem.
I’ve said this before on the Voyager Rewatch. Terra Nova plays very much like a retread of Voyager’s Friendship One, which aired only mere months before this. I don’t mind Trek rehashing similar plot beats, but they could have spaced them out more.
And while the concept itself is sound, the execution is not. This is a very, very slowly paced episode with no sense of urgency or stakes – which makes that sequence of Archer and Jamin rescuing the trapped Novan all the more staged and artificial, and not much of a climax either.
Speaking of Jamin, he’s easily the most one-note boring antagonist I’ve seen on a Trek show. We’re supposed to feel sorry for the Novans, but he just comes across as petulant and stubborn (and also stupid, as we realize their enviromental problem is the product of an asteroid rather than human interference – at least the Friendship One crisis was the product of human error). And the Novan dialect – while a good idea in concept – just feels grating after 45 minutes. LeVar Burton tries his best, but the fact is the episode needed a few more drafts.
@69. I appreciate the response, but I completely disagree with every word you said, LOL. As kkozoriz said, the practices and morals taken for granted in other Trek cultures, even of the highest order like the Vulcans, may strike us as objectively wrong, yet somehow they make it work. The Klingons have an interesting set of morals and values as well. You are filtering your views through your own sense of right and wrong. “Some beliefs just plain don”t work” is only true if everyone is working toward the same end, which, in Trek, is rarely the case. You can’t possibly know what definitively works, what is moral, what is fair, in other cultures or another planes of existence. Look at the Mirror Universes for example. Are we “better” than them because our virtues are not theirs? Look at our own world. In nature, it is typically survival of the fittest, and, to quote one of Clint Eastwood’s characters “fair’s got nothing to do with it.”
We are the most evolved species on this planet. We think. We reason. We build, and we like to pretend that way down deep inside, collectively we are good. And yet we consume everything else that lives on this world if it fills our bellies, makes us comfortable, or amuses us.. I’m not above the idea that what we think is right and just may strike an alien somewhere looking at us from far away as abhorrent and disgusting.
@72/fullyfunctional: “may strike us as objectively wrong”
That’s a contradictory phrase. “Objective” specifically means that it isn’t dependent on individual perception. It is objectively wrong that a square wheel is better than a round one, because it just doesn’t work that way no matter what anyone believes. Objective reality exists, for Pete’s sake. It is unreasonable to think that everything is purely a matter of subjective opinion. That’s the kind of muddy thinking that’s led to vaccine denial and nearly a million Americans dying because people think that science is something they can “choose not to believe in” rather than something that’s true whether they bloody believe in it or not.
Besides, the other reason your objection makes no sense is that I am criticizing my own culture’s corrupt prison system. I am an American, and I recognize that what Americans believe about how best to punish criminals is objectively, provably wrong, something that has always been a demonstrable failure but that Americans cling to out of pure ideology in denial of the documented facts. So I am not blinded my my culture’s prejudices — I am guided by the hard data that refutes those prejudices. Because that is how you decide between opposing points of view — by understanding that you can actually find out the right answer by looking at the objective data. As Mark Twain said, “Supposing is good, but finding out is better.”
# 72 – “I recognize that what Americans believe about how best to punish criminals is objectively, provably wrong, something that has always been a demonstrable failure but that Americans cling to out of pure ideology in denial of the documented facts.”
And yet, capital punishment is still a legal opinion in 27 states, the federal government and the military. The US allows capital punishment for those as young as 15. It appears that the majority of your country don’t agree with your assertion that it doesn’t work.
So, if someone from another country stages a prison break on an American death row, would you agree that they were morally in the right?
Is it the self appointed job of the Federation to decide what is an appropriate punishment, not just for Federation planets but for the entire galaxy?
#72 –
If by Mirror Universe you mean the Terran Empire specifically, then we’re talking about a universe where fascism reigns, murder is used to get ahead, genocide is practiced on planets that resist, and sentient species get eaten. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say, yes, we are better than that. Or so we should be. I mean, that is the point of it, to show us how things could go terribly wrong in future history. It’s not subtle at all. It’s quite cartoonish. Fascism usually is.
@75/Rosco: Right. Not everything is a matter of opinion or cultural relativism. Some systems provably don’t work, or do more harm than good, and clinging to the belief that they’re beneficial is not a valid alternate point of view, it’s just wrong. Heck, this was established explicitly in “Mirror, Mirror” itself. Mirror Spock confirmed that the Empire simply would not work in the long run, that it was doomed to collapse because its methods were fatally flawed. It was never presented as a valid alternative. It’s an abuse of the concept of cultural relativism to apply it to something like that, to something where hard evidence and the record of history shows clearly that it does more harm than good.
I’m also struck by the use of the Clint Eastwood quote (it’s actually “Deserves got nothing to do with it.”) in this context. Unforgiven is, after all, the story of wronged women being unsatisfied with their community’s form of justice and then seeking outside help to institute their own brand of more extreme justice.
It’s all about judging norms, as many a western morality play has done. Which could be argued is where Star Trek’s true western roots lie. Roddenberry was certainly no stranger to that genre.
@76 – And yet The Federation turned it’s back on the Romulans in an act of cowardice and, centuries later, almost totally collapsed due to it’s dilithium based economy. Nothing lasts forever. And while Spock’s prediction was correct, it was replaced as something just as bad.
#78 –
So what’s your point? We can’t judge flaws in systems now because our own system might fail in the future? When that happens, you simply take steps to improve that system too.
@77/Rosco: There’s more to it than norms, though. Norms, beliefs, these things only make sense if they acknowledge reality. Abstract belief is only enough in totally abstract questions. When it comes to something concrete, like what actually works well at preventing crime, or what government system is most successful, that’s not a matter of opinions or beliefs or “norms,” that’s a matter of tangible results. You don’t have to base your conclusions on mere belief when you can actually find out what works and what doesn’t.
That’s the value system that Star Trek is rooted in — not just morality, but rationalism. The notion that reality is knowable and understandable, that problems can be solved by intelligence and reason. That our values are chosen not just for arbitrary or subjective reasons, but because we have learned from experience, corrected past mistakes, and learned to do better.
#80 –
I was about to say, reality and rationalism are important, yes, goes without saying — but these days those things really do need saying! So yeah, you’re quite right about that.
@79 – Yes, we can judge other’s systems as well as our own. What we can’t do is make the assumption that iur system will work for other races and impose our values upon them.
@80 – “That our values are chosen not just for arbitrary or subjective reasons, but because we have learned from experience, corrected past mistakes, and learned to do better.”
And what would our values system be if an advanced alien races showed up and imposed their beliefs upon us?
In A Piece of the Action, Kirk takes it upon himself to change a society who freely chose to base their entire belief system in a book that was left on their planet when the prime directives was specifically said to be not in force. And then at the end, Kirk says flat out:
” I propose our cut be put into the planetary treasury and used to guide the Iotians into a more ethical system. Despite themselves, they’ll be forced to accept conventional responsibilities.”
So, one person gets to decide what is the best way for an entire planet to live their lives. The Iotians get no say in the matter, especially after Kirk demonstrates how totally outclassed they are technologically. But, he’s human, specifically a white American male, so, obviously, his morals are assumed to be superior to the poor, backwards Iotians. Yeah, they’ll really learn their lesson from that.
But, who asked him???
@58: Incidentally, it once occurred to me that effective universal translation could be the result of a transcultural interstellar project—a species could decide that whenever they meet a new species and learn their language, they will instruct them to begin future first contacts by broadcasting a description of their language in a specific format, and to do the same for every species they in turn meet, and so on. Eventually, the protocols would spread, and species that had never met before would still know about the protocols and be able to communicate.
@62: I’m also envisioning a real-time annotation system where the viewscreen provides glosses on terms that can’t be translated—e.g. “a targ is a boar-like animal native to the Klingon homeworld”.
This seems similar to the Web concept of schema tags. There’s a consortium representing the major search engine developers that put together a standard for adding properties to HTML which would be recognized as representing specific things. This is how, when you Google a business, they can tell you that business’s operating hours, or identify the business’s phone number from the content of their website. I can see various species putting together a standard which would be used by translation software in a similar way.
@83. These are ingenious ideas. The thing about the Universal Translator, however, is that it is supposed to work for an alien language you have never encountered before. This seems to raise logical problems. In terms of the fiction, of course, its purpose is to enable the story to ignore the tedious communications issues and get into the substance immediately. (In TOS they didn’t even explain translation: Roddenberry’s view was that you shouldn’t explain, just show in use, even though you as author might have an explanation. ) In the rare cases where language is important to the story, you can easily sidestep the translator: the machine isn’t working, or what it produces isn’t helpful (Darmok), or something.
The best theory for a Universal Translator yet proposed, in my view, is the Babel Fish. I.e., a system based on some sort of mind-reading, not necessarily telepathy but analysis of brain activity perhaps.
@84/pinlighter: Sorry, but that’s actually the worst theory for universal translation. It’s common in fiction to assume that mind-reading would allow perfect understanding in ways that spoken language wouldn’t, but that’s getting it completely backward. There is no magic universal language of minds. Every brain encodes information differently, in a unique web of connections and associations based on personal experience. One person’s associational network for storing ideas, read directly, would be largely incomprehensible to another, aside from some broad-strokes commonalities in how brains store sensory information (and even those wouldn’t be shared between different species). Language is how we communicate thoughts from one mind to another, by both minds agreeing to use a common symbol for the same concept.
@84 – Actually, they did in Metamorphsis. It’s basically telepathy done technologically. Which makes you wonder why they don’t use it to read the mids of Klingons and what not.
COCHRANE: What’s the theory behind this device?
KIRK: There are certain universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life. This device instantaneously compares the frequency of brainwave patterns, selects those ideas and concepts it recognises, and then provides the necessary grammar.
SPOCK: Then it translates its findings into English.
COCHRANE: You mean it speaks?
KIRK: With a voice or the approximation of whatever the creature is on the sending end. Not one hundred percent efficient, but nothing ever is.
@5/ED: “(Not to mention this allows us to weasel out of questions like “Well if Centaurans are so blamed important, why haven’t we seen one?” by crying “You have, but they look just like us!”)”
Watching TOS and TNG as a kid, before First Contact contradicted the fanon version of Cochrane’s origins, I always assumed that as many as half of the “human” Enterprise crewmembers were actually Centaurans.
@12/fullyfunctional: “@10 your comment about Archer and the phase pistol reminds me of something else about this episode that is a running issue with me in anything with Scott Bakula in it. I try to be a fan,, but there’s something about his acting delivery that just grates on me at times.”
ENT was the only Star Trek series aired in my late mother’s lifetime of which she never saw a single episode, and the reason was Scott Bakula. For some reason, she just didn’t like watching him. It was nothing specific; he just had a low “Q-rating” with her (no, nothing to do with that Q…).
@87/Anthony Bernacci: It’s inaccurate to say that the native Centaurian idea was “the fanon version of Cochrane’s origins.” Some fan references and tie-in novels asserted that, while others depicted Cochrane as “Metamorphosis” intended, an Earth human who colonized Alpha Centauri after inventing warp drive. The belief in native Centaurians was never universal among fans.
@35/CLB: “Contrary to many, many really ignorant sci-fi stories, it would be quite easy to tell the difference between a species’ home planet and a species they were transplanted to just by studying the native life’s genetics and the fossil record.”
Larry Niven, who I’d expect to know better, proposed that H. sapiens was not native to Earth in his “Known Space” stories. Humans were the larval form of Pak Protectors, and what we saw as signs of aging (hair and teeth loss, for two) were “really” indications that it was time for us to eat of the tree-of-life plant and transform into our final forms. I’ve always wondered if he meant that concept as a joke.
But recognizing the indisputability of the evidence we’re really from here, there was a Stargate (SG-1 or Atlantis; it wouldn’t matter much which) episode I always wanted to see, where we learned that some type of creationism was common on worlds with stargates. Since most of those planets had Earth fauna and flora, brought to them by the Ancients or the Goa’uld, the ones that developed the sciences of paleontology and archaeology would discover that their fossil records wen down to a depth of a few hundreds or thousands of years, in all the complexity and diversity they saw in their present day, and then just stopped.
If I were a person on such a world, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an explanation other than “we were all suddenly miracled into existence.”
@89/terracinque: There were a number of ideas in early Known Space stories that were later discredited, like life on Mars. I think there were some ideas he stuck with later on more out of a regard for consistency than anything else. Although to be fair to Niven, they didn’t have modern tools for genetic analysis back then, so our direct genetic relationship to the rest of the life on Earth wasn’t as indisputable at the time as it is now.
As for Stargate, I could live with the initial proposal that the Ancients were an earlier hominin branch that evolved on Earth and later tweaked our evolution to resemble them. The fossil record is incomplete enough that the idea, while a stretch, isn’t entirely absurd. But then they threw away credibility when they retconned the Ancients as having come from another galaxy. And then they established that all life in the galaxy had been created by some Ancient machine, which at least would explain its genetic interconnectedness, but was still quite silly.
@90 / CLB:
Yeah, I hated the ‘Ancients were Extragalactic Refugees’ retcon — and still do.
I much preferred the first evolution of humanity concept more, too.
@91/Mr. Magic: Stargate, like Star Trek, was a franchise that occasionally had really good science (at least compared to the utter gibberish of most film/TV sci-fi), but then went and threw in some totally fanciful ideas that cancelled it out. SG-1’s “Tangent,” for example, was a terrific, solid hard-SF problem-solving story aside from the use of hyperdrive, and one of the few times I’ve ever seen a screen SF production acknowledge lightspeed time lag in communication (and not only that, but handle it really well). And “Prophecy” in season 6, while it had the fanciful premise of Jonas receiving visions of the future, contained one of the best discussions of quantum physics I’ve ever seen on TV. But then they had to go and do the literal Ancient astronaut thing.
@92,
Yeah, “Tangent” is a favorite of mine from Season Four, too.
It’s the kind of story Stargate was really only able to do in the early Seasons (before the Prometheus and the Daedelus and the Asgard beaming). That was something I liked about SGU — how in many ways it was back to basics with most of the SGC’s accumulated toys from the previous 12 years getting tossed out the window when the Icarus survivors were stranded
(Plus, Daniel’s ‘cunning’ Goa’uld disguise as ‘the Great and Powerful Oz’ and Jacob/Selmak’s utterly pained reaction always makes me crack up).
The episode writer, Michael Cassutt, also teaches at USC Cinema occasionally. I had his class my first semester there back in 2014. Naturally, I had to ask him about this episode and I remember we had a nice conversation about what it was like working with Brad Wright and company.
@90/CLB: Huh. I don’t remember that but about the Ancient machine, and I’m glad of that.
Also, I wasn’t criticizing Niven, just for the record.
@93/Mr. Magic: SGU was my favorite of the three series, and I’ve always felt it was treated badly by SyFy
@94/terracinque: I don’t think the network can be blamed for SGU’s short run. The Stargate franchise was a big success for Syfy and they had every reason to want to support it, especially since MGM co-funded the show. But SGU tried to be different and darker and more adult, and it wasn’t what the audience expected, and I don’t think it was entirely successful at it either. So a lot of the Stargate fanbase walked away or was actively hostile to the show. The first season had sagging ratings, and though the network’s attempt to move its time slot in response turned out to hurt its ratings further, I’m not sure keeping it in the same slot would’ve helped any. It wasn’t an arbitrary or malicious move, merely an attempt to cope with the loss of viewership that was already happening.
@95/CLB: There are many reasons for SGU’s failure, including the ones you cite, but it also didn’t help that SyFy put it on in the fall, competing against the broadcast networks’ new seasons, which no previous Stargate series had been asked to do before.
@96/terracinque: That may be true, but that strikes me more as an expression of faith in the show than bad treatment. If they put it up against the network’s fall lineup, that must be because they believed it was strong enough to hold its own there. They wouldn’t invest so much in the show if they wanted it to fail. At worst, they were overconfident about the show’s chances. But every TV scheduling decision is a gamble, because it’s a very competitive field. You put in your players where you think they have the best chance to score, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
People are always so quick to read malice into every network decision that hurts a show, but network execs are only human and can’t guarantee the outcomes of their decisions any more than the rest of us can. All they can do is try to make good choices and hope they come out ahead of the competition, which is never guaranteed. And SGU tried to do something innovative and challenging rather than conforming to comfortable formula, and that is always, always going to reduce the chances of success even further. Frankly, though I respect the effort, I don’t believe the experiment entirely worked, and I’m not surprised that it couldn’t hold an audience.
Actually, the channel did sabotage both SGU and Caprica by moving them to Tuesday nights for their second seasons, because they wanted to put wrestling on Friday nights. Friday night had been the home of both Stargate and Battlestar Galactica and their spinoffs for years. They had set audiences there, and also weaker competition from the major networks.
The move to Tuesdays, though, kneecapped both shows in the ratings, as the network competition was much stronger on Tuesdays (a lot of top-rated shows like House and NCIS were on Tuesday).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@98/krad: I gathered that SGU’s ratings were already in decline on Friday nights. As I said, while the move to Tuesday did hurt the show, I don’t know if keeping it on Friday would’ve saved it. It might’ve just hastened the inevitable.
Also, while I agree that replacing the Friday lineup with wrestling turned out badly for the network’s scripted shows, I remember being told once that the decision to air wrestling on Fridays came from the wrestling people rather than the Sci-Fi execs. Apparently the wrestling show had been on Friday nights on its previous venue, and they insisted on staying where they were. Since the show was such a major source of funding for Sci-Fi, they were kind of at the mercy of what the wrestling folks demanded. I don’t deny it was a decision that turned out poorly, but I think words like “sabotage” imply a degree of malicious intent that just wasn’t there. Just because something was a bad decision doesn’t mean it was bad on purpose.
It would have been better to use the passive voice there, saying the shows were sabotaged by the move to Tuesday.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@100/krad: That’s fair, but I still question whether either SGU or Caprica would’ve been successful even if they’d stayed on Friday. They were both respectable but flawed efforts.
An episode that starts off interesting enough, but becomes bog-standard once the shuttle falls through the service, just so many inevitabilities. The one thing I realized when watching this one is how Bakula’s voice is a little like John Denver’s, though without the genuine heart and warmth.
I’m greatly surprised that I end up like Trip more and more as the show goes on.
But the theme song? I can’t get over that.