“Sleeping Dogs”
Written by Fred Dekker
Directed by Les Landau
Season 1, Episode 14
Production episode 015
Original air date: January 30, 2002
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Sato is at the shooting range with Reed. She still can’t get above a 50% hit rate with the new phase pistols. Their practice is interrupted by the ship unexpectedly coming out of warp: they’ve encountered a class-9 gas giant.
T’Pol doesn’t think it’s much of a big deal, until they detect a crashed ship on the planet, with some bio-signs. Archer has T’Pol put together a boarding party—which may also need to be a rescue party. Sato goes to Archer and asks to be put on the team—a far cry from when they first set out and she was dead set against field work. Archer happily informs her that T’Pol had already requested that she be on the team with her and Reed.
Speaking of the armory officer, he’s in sickbay with a cold. Phlox treats him and approves him for away-team duty, as long a he doesn’t sneeze inside the helmet of his EVA suit.
The ship is sinking into the planet’s core, so the boarding party only has an hour or so. They arrive, and Sato recognizes the markings on board as Klingons, though it’s an unfamiliar type of ship. The good news is that the atmosphere and gravity are intact so they don’t need the EVA suits—though the smell is sufficiently awful that Reed is actually grateful to have a cold.
They find the crew unconscious on the bridge. T’Pol urges them to leave the crew there, as Klingon warriors prefer to die at their posts and are offended by the notion of being rescued. Reed does not share that position.
However, there is one Klingon who’s conscious: a female engineer names Bu’kaH, who ambushes Reed and then steals the shuttle pod, leaving the boarding party stranded.
Bu’kaH transmits a distress call when she achieves orbit. Enterprise takes the shuttle in tow with the grappler and brings it aboard. Bu’kaH takes out two security guards and almost takes out Tucker, but Archer is able to render her unconscious with his phase pistol. That’s why they pay him the captain money…
T’Pol, Reed, and Sato try to figure out how to operate the Klingon ship. Archer tries to pull off a rescue, but the Klingon ship has sunk too far for it to be safe to bring a shuttle pod down. So he brings Enterprise into the atmosphere, but the pressure is too much for the larger ship also, and they have to abort.
Bu’kaH regains consciousness and is convinced that the humans are behind the attack on their vessel. Phlox has detected a neurotoxin in Bu’kaH’s blood that is probably also responsible for rendering the rest of the crew comatose.
The boarding party finds the captain’s log: apparently they raided a Xarantine outpost. The neurotoxin was in the Xarantine ale that they looted and celebrated with. Archer, having failed when he asked Bu’kaH for help like a human, instead tries to think like a Klingon. He points out to Bu’kaH that to die of being poisoned by the booze you stole from a lesser race is not an honorable death.
Reed is getting dehydrated, and Sato and T’Pol go to the galley to get him some water. After seeing gagh and live targs for the first time, Sato starts to have an anxiety attack, but T’Pol is able to calm her down with a Vulcan meditation technique.
The boarding party fires the ship’s photon torpedoes to try to lift them higher in the atmosphere. The first few attempts don’t do much good, and it’s Sato who suggests firing a whole mess of torpedoes, draining the ship’s supply of them. This actually works, and brings the Klingon ship high enough that Archer and Bu’kaH can effect a rescue. Bu’kaH also brings Phlox’s cure for the neurotoxin, and administers it to her crew.
The Klingon ship—which is called the Somraw—breaks atmosphere and comes into orbit. The captain immediately threatens Enterprise. Archer calls his bluff, saying that his ship is barely holding it together and also that he knows for a fact that they’re out of torpedoes.
Everyone goes their separate ways. T’Pol, Sato, and Reed enjoy their stay in the decon chamber, which is refreshingly not stinky.
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Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The magnetic fields of a gas giant’s atmosphere give off odd sounds when scanned. Mayweather refers to them as “siren calls,” and they used to give him nightmares as a kid when the Horizon passed by a gas giant.
The gazelle speech. Archer is frustrated when trying to deal with Klingons. This will be a running theme…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol uses a meditation technique on Sato that seem to use Vulcan touch telepathy to some extent, though that’s never said out loud. Given the proscription against mind-melding that will be established in “Stigma,” this is particularly interesting…
Florida Man. Florida Man Keeps Chair Warm For Captain While Captain Does All The Fun Stuff.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox thinks it’s perfectly okay for Reed to go on an away team while sick with a cold which, after the last two years, comes across as howlingly irresponsible.
Qapla’! The Somraw appears to be Klingon military, but they’re also raiding sovereign outposts, so they may also be pirates. Or both. Also we see that they keep targs on board in a cargo hold to be killed for food when it’s suppertime…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. T’Pol, Sato, and Reed all sit remarkably close to each other in their underwear in the decon chamber….
More on this later… The boarding party discovers that Klingons have something called “photon torpedoes” that they’ve never heard of before.
Also Reed bitches that they haven’t cured the common cold—which we know will be cured by the twenty-fourth century…
I’ve got faith…
“It’s called gagh. It’s a Klingon delicacy, but only when they’re alive.”
“They look like worms.”
“They are worms.”
–T’Pol introducing Sato to Klingon cuisine.
Welcome aboard. Vaughn Armstrong plays the Klingon captain. Originally Stephen Lee was to play the role, but he was unable to and Armstrong came in at the last minute to fill in. It’s Armstrong’s tenth role on a Trek show and his third Klingon (the others being his first Trek role, in TNG’s “Heart of Glory,” and also in Voyager’s “Endgame“).
Michelle C. Bonilla plays Bu’kaH.
Trivial matters: This is the final directorial credit for Les Landau, one of the most prolific directors in the Trek stable going back to the first season of TNG, and the only Enterprise episode he helmed. He appears to have retired from TV and film work after this.
Sato expressed apprehension about going on away missions in “Fight or Flight,” which she seems to have gotten over.
This is the only mention of the Xarantine people on screen, though the Rise of the Federation novel A Choice of Futures by regular commenter Christopher L. Bennett established that the yellow-skinned species seen in “Broken Bow” are the Xarantines. The Xarantine home system is also mentioned in both your humble rewatcher’s A Time for War, a Time for Peace and David Mack’s Destiny trilogy.
In 2020, Michelle C. Bonilla and Scott Bakula were reunited on an episode of NCIS: New Orleans, on which Bakula starred and Bonilla guest-starred.
It’s been a long road… “Remind me to stop trying to help people.” There’s nothing actively wrong with this episode. It’s a pretty basic try-to-rescue-a-ship-in-distress storyline that we’ve seen several billion times before from “The Doomsday Machine” to “The Next Phase” to “The Ship” to “Timeless” to “Context is for Kings” to “First First Contact.”
But there’s a goodly amount that’s passively wrong with the episode. Indeed, the episode is way way too passive. There’s absolutely no sense of tension or danger. The closest we come is when Sato throws a nutty in the mess hall, but that’s over with pretty quickly. It’s good to see that T’Pol feels comfortable enough with the crew at this point to help Sato out, at least. But there’s never any feeling that the boarding party is in serious danger, not from the music, not from the directing, not from the acting.
Indeed, something I’ve noticed about this season so far is that the show very rarely ends an act and goes to commercial break on a note of tension or suspense or curiosity. I can’t imagine what the thinking is there, but it’s been happening often enough that it seems to be a preference in the writers room. It’s actually less of an issue watching it now on Paramount+ or Netflix or your own DVDs, as there are no commercial breaks, but it still leads to a curtain of inconsequentiality hanging over the entire program.
This is especially problematic on a show that’s supposed to be all about the wild and wacky world of early human space travel, which should be chock full of danger and difficulty. But there was more tension, more sense of danger, in DS9’s “Starship Down,” which also had ships bopping about in a gas giant, even though the Defiant and the Jem’Hadar were way more technologically advanced and more experienced than the Enterprise and Somraw crew here.
It doesn’t help that the Klingons are dumber than a box of hair. The captain of the Somraw chose to land on the gas giant for some stupid reason and Bu’kaH’s belief that Enterprise poisoned them makes nothing like sense. And then the captain’s empty threat to attack Enterprise at the end is just ridiculous. You don’t expect them to thank Archer, but the very least they could do after Enterprise saved them from an embarrassingly dishonorable death is not try to shoot them.
It’s a good character piece, especially for Sato, building nicely on her anxieties established back in “Fight or Flight.” And I like that Archer’s trying to be a better diplomat and that he goes to the trouble of studying more about the Klingons (though you’d think he would’ve done more of that during and after “Broken Bow”…).
Still, this is ultimately nothing more than an average rescue-the-ship episode.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges folks to support the anthology The Fans are Buried Tales, edited by veteran Star Trek novelist Peter David and Kathleen O. David, to which Keith is one of the contributors. It features cosplayers telling stories in character for whoever they’re dressed as, and other contributors include fellow Trek prose stylists Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, Aaron Rosenberg, Rigel Ailur, Robert T. Jeschonek, and John Peel, and tons more besides. Here’s the link to the anthology’s Kickstarter.
The only thing that I remember from this one is the live targ in the Klingon larder. I remember thinking that intuitively it makes sense that the Klingons would bring live meat with them on their voyages, but I had difficulty imagining the logistics of bringing enough targs to feed the entire crew. Maybe they only slaughter them for special occasions.
“The one time we need our chief engineer is the one time we leave him behind.”
I enjoyed that episode but I’m struggling to know what to say about it, so I guess I mostly agree with Keith in that regard. As with the Klingons’ last appearance, it’s intriguing to see Archer struggling to grasp concepts about a culture we know a lot about. The plot’s rather by-the-numbers, but it’s worth it for the character moments. It’s quite cheeky of Archer to wait for Sato to volunteer for the away mission and then tell her she’s been requested anyway. T’Pol spends a surprising amount of time deferring to both Reed and Sato, but she does get a nice bonding moment with Hoshi teaching her the meditation technique. (T’Pol says she can teach Sato to do it on her own, so I doubt it’s touch telepathy. More likely something similar to the Vulcan neuro pressure that we learn T’Pol is adept at in “The Xindi”.) Archer and Tucker get a comradely nod when Archer decides to take Enterprise into the gas giant, although I’m not sure Tucker smirking in sickbay while their friends are in danger is entirely appropriate. And Archer gets a badass moment facing down the Klingon captain.
At the risk of offending people, I’m with Reed’s British stoicism in refusing to take a sick day. As I said right when we started being told to stay at home if we had “flu-like symptoms”, if I locked myself away every time I had a bit of a sniffle or felt a bit hot, I’d never leave the house.
As in “Broken Bow”, the simplistic Vulcan attitude is to let a wounded Klingon die and call it respecting their culture, but the compassionate human attitude turns out not to be entirely unwelcome. Archer says they’ve encountered the Klingons three times, presumably referring to “Broken Bow” and “Unexpected”: This is their last appearance of the first season. Insanely, with T’Pol, Reed and Sato all off the ship, Tucker is left running between their consoles on the bridge. Were the other 70-odd crewmembers on strike?
It’s not entirely clear why Archer can go straight up to the bridge on returning to the ship while T’Pol, Reed and Sato have to go through decon. Except for a comedy tag scene.
1. I suspect it may have been the captain’s Targ which got into the larder, rather than a meal-in-waiting.
I’m not going to lie, that Comedy Tag scene absolutely made the episode for me; there’s something absolutely charming about the indomitable T’Pol being not quite so above it all when Hoshi & Reed decide they’re just done and flop out for all they’re worth (Also, it’s not impossible that the anti-virus aspect of the decontamination room is helping with poor Reed’s cold, which would make him doubly keen to avoid leaving).
Having said that I’m quite astonished that Dahar master krad’s attitude to the episode is merely lukewarm; this being a Klingon episode where the Klingons don’t make much of a showing one expected him to wholeheartedly loathe it!
Having said that, my impression was that the Klingon captain chose to hide out in the atmosphere of that gas giant because he didn’t have enough time or enough functional hands to get her anywhere safer once the crew started dropping; I also cannot help but suspect that the Klingon captain was explicitly attempting Suicide by Starfleet when he challenged Captain Archer at the end – after all, it’s either that or be found by his peers in a truly pitiful state, his crew having been incapacitated by alien booze*, his ship having been left throughly ravaged by the consequences of that incapacitation and both having only been saved from the consequences of their own carelessness by an alien starship.
“Death before dishonour” after all.
Also, it amuses me to imagine that Bu’kaH is more lucky than wise; exactly the sort of Klingon who leaps on conclusions and does her best to keep the facts from wriggling out from under her to inconvenience a nice, telling conclusion (It’s also very possible that the effects of that alien booze* might well be affecting her judgement).
*I can’t decide if it’s more amusing to imagine this little potation as being alien booze the Klingons simply cannot handle, a deliberately-prepared trap or something no Xarantine would ever dream of drinking (but which Captain Hangover and crew, high on life and keen on a little extra buzz, chugged without deigning to read the label).
Personally, one favours the notion that the Xarantines set a trap, but would still be astonished the raiders actually drank the stuff (“It said “Not to be Drunk!” by the Nine Sages” “Apparently the Klingons thought that was a challenge, not a public service”).
Also, no lie, I took one look at the T’Pol/Hoshi scene in the galley and thought “Well somebody ships it and I’m not going to blame them”.
I think my favorite part here was the mentor-pupil relationship they set up between T’Pol and Sato. I don’t recall how much they followed up on it later, but I think they did occasionally.
IIRC, this is the first time we saw a 22nd-century Klingon ship design in ENT. “Unexpected” just recycled stock footage of the K’tinga class from TMP, which was anachronistic, but required by time limitations.
Not much else I can think to add here, except it’s nice when ENT establishes that humans didn’t invent every technology Starfleet uses later on. Apparently they got the idea for photon torpedoes from the Klingons.
“The captain of the Somraw chose to land on the gas giant for some stupid reason…”
You can’t “land” on a gas giant, since it has no land. The captain’s log explained that they descended into the atmosphere to take cover from any other Xarantine ships that might be patrolling. That’s not stupid at all; it’s actually a pretty sound strategy, since Jovian atmospheres can be dense and have a lot of EM interference that would obscure sensors. (I often feel the Mutara Nebula scenes in TWOK would’ve made more sense in a Jovian atmosphere, since real nebulae are nothing like that but Jovian atmospheres are.)
Speaking of which, the bit about the “siren songs” from Jovian magnetic fields is based on a real-life phenomenon discussed here. I alluded to the phenomenon in my TOS novel The Face of the Unknown.
I established the yellow-skinned background aliens from “Broken Bow” as the Xarantines because the name reminded me vaguely of the Greek prefix for yellow, xanth-.
@ed in 5, combine it with the return of the infamous decon chamber and the intrepid trio shedding layers of their space suits, one wonders how deliberate that was …
I agree with the KRAD regarding the weird lack of urgency. They knew the time was running out, but there is time for a chat, or two, or three?
@7. o.m. Well clearly those creatives knew that you can’t have a fleet without shipping…
Targs are big enough that one can probably feed several Klingons, especially if you use a lot of it for different bits of food…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@9. krad: I’ll bet the Klingon equivalent of “We will eat every part of a pig except the squeal” features a targ instead (In fact I’m surprised that this episode wasn’t “Sleeping targs” … actually now I say it out loud, “Sleeping murder” might sound rather better than that).
I was just disappointed that an episode called “Sleeping Dogs” didn’t once feature Porthos sleeping.
The Klingon captain may have wanted to get rid of any witnesses to their rescue by humans. It would have been interesting to have this episode show up later as an example of how Humans don’t respect Klingon values or culture. The Vulcans don’t seem to have gotten into as many shooting matches with the Klingons as Archer will.
Riker was more into the “When in Rome” attitude towards other species. Picard, to a lesser degree, particularly when it came to ceremonies and such. But Like jumped in with both feet and gladly.
I actually rather liked this one, but maybe it was because it came right after “Dear Doctor.” I enjoyed seeing the crew struggle to understand the Klingon computer displays and labels, as that’s something a universal translator can’t fix instantly, even in the 24th century when the translators are advanced enough to instantainiously translate audio. We should have had more of this in other episodes.
The scene with Reed range-testing Sato on the new phase pistols was interesting to me. She mentions she is much better with the old gun, which makes me wonder why Reed feels so strongly about her being qualified with the new one. This would have been an opertune time to harp on the possibility the stun setting afords, as before it seems the only weapons availible were lethel at all settings. On the one hand, it makes the decision of taking down possible hostiles much easier if you don’t have to worry about killing them, and it’s just as easy and effective to stun someone as kill them with either the stun setting or the old guns. On the other hand, having fewer inhibitions about openeing fire means people are bound to do so more often, which can’t be good for PR, and there is no gaurntee that the bad guys will be shooting harmless stun blasts back at you.
It also makes you wonder how often Starfleet expects the crew to get into firefights if the whole crew needs to be qualified on the latest weapons; or if this was just an idea of Archer or Reed after several incidents with shooting had occured. Is Starfleet at this point supposed to be more like NASA, an Earth Space Force military body with exploring as an interest, or more like the military/explorer hybrid we see in the subsequent series?
@13/Ecthalion of Greg: Given that Enterprise has explicitly military forces assigned to it during the Xindi crisis–something that was never seen in any of the chronologically later series–I think it’s safe to assume that Starfleet is primarily a NASA-like organization at this stage in its history. That said, given that the ship has already been boarded by hostile aliens twice at this point, I think that giving everyone onboard basic training in the use of weapons seems like a sensible precaution.
“the boarding party is in serious danger, … from the music” is the episode I want to see.
I like sinking submarine stories so I enjoyed this one. I agree that the tension could have been wratcheted up a bit, but overall I had a good time with it, though my biggest complaint is that it makes the klingons look stupider than usual.
I also find it interesting that there seems to be a very blurry distinction between Klingon pirates and the Klingon military in the 22nd century. No one is wearing a uniform in either this or later episodes. I think that this actually fits pretty well with Discovery‘s revelation that the Empire fell into chaos for the better part of a century after this series. Presumably, the Empire was already in decline and the Augment Virus was enough to destroy what remained of centralized authority on Qo’noS.
@9./krad, were any of the sides of meat in the galley targs, by any chance? But then, one would expect Klingons to eat great meals.
@11: Me too now!
@16/David Pirtle: “though my biggest complaint is that it makes the klingons look stupider than usual.”
Naturally some Klingons are going to be smarter and more competent than others. These seemed more like freebooters than military officers, as Iacomina said, so they’re probably less well trained than regular Defense Force personnel.
I mean, if you compare Archer’s crew to Kirk’s or Picard’s, you could say the show makes humans look stupider than usual, because they don’t have as much experience and knowledge of the galaxy as later Starfleet crews.
Well, even if they created a greater sense of danger, it would be clear to everyone that the trio is going to make it, so I am not sure I this would’ve made me enjoy the episode more. As it was, I appreciated it for focusing on the characters.
@12: If we believe Discovery, the Vulcans got into nothing but shooting matches with the Klingons when they first met them. Archer gets into surprisingly few (stunning a Klingon here is the only example so far), mostly during Season 2. He and his crew tend to do a fairly good job of talking them down.
@24/cap: I don’t see that much difference. DSC revealed that the Vulcans learned they had to respect the Klingon point of view and engage with them on their own terms (opening with a show of strength to earn their respect so they’d be willing to talk) rather than expecting them to conform to the Vulcans’ values and methods. And that’s what Archer’s doing here, trying to persuade the Klingons using their own value system rather than imposing his own.
@22. This reminds me of a universal law I realized years ago: no matter how technologically or socially advanced the civilization, no matter how long their history or how thorough their education, from pre-industrial hunters just mastering fire all the way up to ascended God-races who stride across multiple universes. . . there will always be morons.
Lazy is the adjective that comes up whenever I’m reminded of this episode. And it’s a really unfair assessment. As I understand what happened behind the scenes, Brannon Braga worked himself to exhaustion rewriting every single episode that season down to each scene. Sadly, it wasn’t enough. Sleeping Dogs is not a bad episode, but it’s hopelessly pedestrian and uninspired.
I think this is the point in the season where the writers gave up trying to do original character-centric pieces like Breaking the Ice and Dear Doctor, and just reverted back to doing classic Trek staples in order to fill the intimidating 26 episode order. This is pretty much rescue the ship 101 with nothing to set it apart from its predecessors. It’s telling that the only thing that’s stuck with me on this one was the Hoshi/T’Pol dynamic – I could barely recall Bu’KaH and her act of thievery. Easily the laziest Klingon plot done in the show – even their appearance on Unexpected had more meat.
Though interestingly enough – unlike @krad – I actually enjoy this season’s tendency to do these laidback act breaks. It seems they’re a product of what the show could have been had the entire season taken place on Earth before the Enterprise effectively launched – the show’s original conception. These act breaks remind me quite a bit of the act breaks done in the later seasons of Babylon 5 (especially after the Shadow war had ended; that show’s final season was full of these opening teasers – small character bits that just ended, instead of having an actual cliffhanger).
@ChristopherLBennett: I definitely like your suggestion that the Klingon crew we see in this episode are privateers at best (and more likely blatant pirates), hence their somewhat carelessly gung-ho approach to things (and what looks suspiciously like sloppy thinking).
Also, might I please ask your opinion on whether the Xarantines actually rigged a trap for the raiders? (As the man who gave the Xarantine’s their name, your thoughts on the subject would be much appreciated; I quite like the notion that while the Xarantines are no match for the Klingons in raw firepower or aggression, they ARE subtle enough and ruthless enough to leave poisoned comestibles within snatching distance of the most obnoxious Klingon raiders – on the other hand I also have a sense of humour sufficiently warped to find the notion of Klingons casually chugging down something no Xarantine would dream of putting in their body hilarious, so I can’t really decide which version to prefer).
@28/ED: This episode gave the Xarantines their name. I just associated that name with a makeup design from “Broken Bow.” And the episode provides insufficient data for me to assess whether the poisoning was intentional. Phlox seems to suggest that it was, saying the toxin was “bonded” to a molecule found in Xarantine ale. But it seems like an odd strategy to poison your own goods just in case somebody steals them. I guess if there were an ongoing pattern of raiders stealing the ale, that might provoke such a response. But the Xarantines would have to be very careful to remember which crate was the poisoned one.
@29. Obviously the crate with the grate. The keg with the peg has the brew that is true.
@29: If the Xarantines thought is likely that the Klingons would steal their ale, perhaps they added a neurotoxin that is fatal to Klingons, but harmless to Xarantine physiology. That way they could have their cake protect their ale and drink it too.
@31/Kevin: Makes sense.
This episode will always hold a special place to me because of the Somraw Klingon Raptor. Gorgeous ship.
@29. ChristopherLBennett: Well given that you’re the one who brought together the name & the character design to create a more fully rounded, I still think that you gave the Xarantines their name … from a certain point of view. (-;
After all, if you had not done so they’d just be Yellow Alien #1826B!
@31. Kevin A. Barnes & @30. ChristopherLBennett: I definitely like the notion that the Xarantines laid a trap for the Klingons, if only because one keeps imagining them as natives of the ‘Briar Patch’ (If only so we can finally describe a species as “The B’rer Rabbit of this here Briar Patch!”.
Also, I remain fond of the notion that the Xarantines did mark out the poisoned kegs with their equivalent of the Skull & Crossbones, but the Klingon raiders were to arrogant to learn enough about a ‘lesser species’ to realise that this was the case.
I don’t remember this one at all. But perhaps I did, because the summary makes it sound distinctly forgettable…
Charitably, like 99% of ST: Enterprise, a 9 year old would probably be more receptive to “Sleeping Dogs” …uhhh… entertainment value.
Hmm, this was a much more enjoyable episode than i had expected based on the post. :D
It is indeed different that the script tells us that they are in grave danger, but nothing else suggests that, but to be honest, i’ve found it to be more realistic. The decisions people made trying to save the people were actually quick, just not coming with huge tense music and panicking, so i actually think, this might have been an intentional approach from the director.
And the story actually seems OK, Klingons are a bit more klingon than needed, but besides that, this was a realistic first rescue mission for a klingon ship.
Oh and lots of character development for Hoshi.
I’ve often thought that the most difficult part in acting for broadcast television is holding that look of tension for the commercial break and then picking it back up again. It’s a strange convention, and entirely unnatural, so, it’s actually quite refreshing not to find it in Enterprise.
I enjoyed it. And even found it a little tense, at least the first half. Again we got to see someone welding too, which is a nice change of pace from stuff just magically happening off camera.
Ultimately tho I’m just a sucker for the ghost ship, or nearly ghost ship, story. Give me derelict vessels and I’m quite happy.