“Dead Stop”
Written by Mike Sussman & Phyllis Strong
Directed by Roxann Dawson
Season 2, Episode 4
Production episode 031
Original air date: October 9, 2002
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Tucker and Archer survey the damage done by the Romulans last episode. They don’t have the parts to do a proper repair on the outer hull of the saucer. As it stands, Tucker doesn’t think they can do more than warp two or so, which means it would take the better part of a decade to get back home to Jupiter Station.
Archer has Sato send out a general distress call, on the theory that they’ve answered enough of them over the last year. A Tellarite ship answers, saying they can’t help, but there’s a fantastic repair station not far away. They can get there in a few days at warp two, so Archer sets a course.
They arrive to find an unoccupied station with an atmosphere inimical to human life. But after the ship is scanned by a high-powered scanning beam, the station reconfigures itself to fit Enterprise and now reads as having an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere.
The ship docks and then Archer, T’Pol, and Tucker enter the station. They see a holographic display that shows all the damage to Enterprise, as well as the “damage” to Reed from the mine that ripped into his leg. A computerized voice says that they’ve diagnosed the problems, and they must choose their compensation: either three warp coils, five deuterium injectors, or two hundred liters of warp plasma. Of the three, the plasma is what they can spare the most.
The station provides a repair schedule, which Archer tells T’Pol to have Sato distribute to the crew. The crew is also welcome to use the station’s recreational facilities.
Tucker tests the rec facilities, which create a glass of cold water for T’Pol and a delicious catfish for Tucker. Archer has a bad feeling that this is all too good to be true, as they’re providing a lot for just some warp plasma.
A medical drone completely heals Reed’s leg, while other automated systems work on the saucer and the other damage.
Buy the Book
Drunk on All Your Strange New Words
Tucker and Reed talk about the computer power that must be necessary to make this station work. It’s several times powerful than Enterprise’s computer, yet the only space on the station available for it is tiny. Tucker wants very much to see what kind of computer they must have, and he somehow convinces Reed to go along with him. However, once they get past a certain point, they’re beamed back to Enterprise’s bridge.
Archer tears them a new one, particularly throwing Reed’s complaint about lax discipline on the ship from last week back in his face. He confines them to quarters.
Mayweather is summoned by Archer to Launch Bay 1. Mayweather had thought that area to be off-limits, but Archer says the repairs are done. The pilot arrives to see damage to a console, then he’s ambushed.
Phlox summons Archer to Launch Bay 1 soon thereafter, as Mayweather’s corpse is on the deck. The damaged console bit caused an isolytic shock that killed him instantly. Archer has no idea why Mayweather would’ve been in that area, nor why he would’ve messed with a console.
While doing the autopsy, Phlox discovers that the antibodies from the vaccine the doctor gave to the crew a while back are also dead in Mayweather’s bloodstream. That doesn’t track: an isolytic shock would stimulate the antibodies and they’d be swimming pretty. He realizes that this is a duplicate of Mayweather’s entire body, down to the single-celled organisms, but it’s all dead, including the things that shouldn’t be.
Archer hatches a cunning plan to get Mayweather back once the repairs are complete. Tucker brings the warp plasma payment, but immediately starts complaining to the computer—which only gives stock answers and is not at all equipped to handle complaints.
While Tucker distracts the computer with nonsense, Reed, Archer, and T’Pol use Tucker and Reed’s previous attempt as a guide. Reed triggers the transporter again, but this gives Archer and T’Pol (hanging back) what they need to get through. They find a whole mess of aliens in a comatose state, and also Mayweather. They free him from the thingie he’s hooked up to. Tucker sets an explosive on the warp plasma, and once they’ve rescued Mayweather, they blow up the station. Phlox claims the bodies of the aliens left behind are too brain-damaged to be salvageable, which is apparently enough reason to condemn them to death and blow them up.
After Enterprise, fully repaired and having welshed on their payment, depart, the station starts to reconstruct itself.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The station can do all manner of repairs both mechanical and biological, and can also replicate matter, but only dead matter, not living matter (so it can do catfish as food, but probably not a catfish that can swim).
The gazelle speech. Archer is suspicious of the station from jump, and his fears are justified by the kidnapping of Mayweather.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol does her usual thing of explaining the rest of the galaxy to Archer, particularly saying that Tellarites are not always agreeable but generally trustworthy. She also gets to be Archer’s sounding board, just like a good XO should.
Florida Man. Florida Man Complains To The Manager After Getting Yummy Catfish.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox wishes he could get his hands on the medical repair drone, but it’s apparently not for sale. He also figures out that the Mayweather corpse is fake. Because he’s just that awesome.
Good boy, Porthos! We see Porthos for, like, a second, sitting in Archer’s quarters with him and being all cute.
More on this later… The repair station has matter replicators similar to those seen in the twenty-fourth century and beyond.
I’ve got faith…
“It can’t be ethical to cause a patient this much pain.”
“It’s unethical to harm a patient. I can inflict as much pain as I like.”
–Reed and Phlox discussing medical ethics.
Welcome aboard. For the second week in a row, there are no listed guest stars. However, director Roxann Dawson also does an uncredited turn as the voice of the facility computer.
Trivial matters: The repair station is never seen again onscreen. Its owners are identified as the mysterious Ware by regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett in his post-finale Enterprise novel series Rise of the Federation.
This episode was filmed after the following episode, “A Night in Sickbay,” but was aired first because it took place immediately following “Minefield,” as Enterprise is searching for a means to repair the damage they took at the hands of the Romulans in that episode.
This is the first encounter between humans and Tellarites, introduced in the original series’ “Journey to Babel,” though they are not seen. They were also mentioned in “Carbon Creek” as the ones who picked up T’Mir’s distress signal.
Sato makes reference to having seen dead bodies on the Axanar ship they encountered in “Fight or Flight.”
One piece of damage the station diagnoses is from a minor collision that happened way back in “Broken Bow.” Tucker abashedly says that he hasn’t gotten around to fixing it yet.
It’s been a long road… “Your inquiry was not recognized.” I almost liked this episode. After seven years of Voyager being unconvincingly in perfect shape the next week no matter how much of a beating it took despite having no repair facilities available, I practically cheered when this episode opened with Archer facing the consequences of all the damage they took at the Romulans’ hands.
You can tell that writers Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong are familiar with how computers work (not always a given on far too many SF shows over the decades), as the station computer reacts exactly like a machine: canned responses, only able to provide services it’s explicitly programmed for, completely unable to deal with anything outside its programmed parameters.
In addition, Phlox’s method of figuring out that Mayweather’s corpse is a fake is brilliant, a subtle but believable bit of detective work on the part of the good doctor. And Tucker bitching at the computer like a stereotypical pissed-off customer is hilarious.
But then we get to the ending.
Not the very ending, to wit, the coda when we see the station calmly putting itself back together, which is magnificently creepy. I mean the end of the main storyline.
First off, it’s incredibly convenient that they’re able to get all their repair work done. Yes, it’s too good to be true, but Enterprise suffers no consequences of significance for taking the too-good-to-be-true offer, and they even get Mayweather back.
And then they blow up the station, taking all their prisoners with them.
To be clear, Archer orders the murder of a dozen or more aliens because Phlox thinks they’re too brain-damaged to be saved. First off, who the fuck is he to determine that? We’re talking multiple species here, not all of whom are ones that Earth, Vulcan, and Denobula are necessarily even familiar with—certainly not familiar enough to know everything about their brain chemistry and what constitutes “too brain-damaged.”
They should’ve found a way to rescue everyone. Or done something other than completely blow up the damn station. Archer’s actions were murderous, were deplorable, and showed a depraved indifference to sentient life that’s at odds with, y’know, Star Trek.
Ruined an otherwise good episode, too…
Warp factor rating: 3
Rewatcher’s note: We’ll be taking next Monday off for Independence Day. We’ll be back on the 11th of July with “A Night in Sickbay.”
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be the Author Guest of Honor at InConJunction 41 in Indianapolis, Indiana this coming weekend. He’ll be signing and selling his books, and also doing a ton of programming (his full schedule to be found here).
I remember, when I watched this episode – along with all of Enterprise – during the lockdown, that I really liked this episode because the idea of the automated repair station was something new, and I wasn’t used to seeing anything on Star Trek that genuinely felt new in a long time. This repair station is exactly what Voyager should have encountered after the damage incurred in “Deadlock.”
Also, I think I remember seeing a Cardassian among all the bodies assembled in the station. That detail – all of the different aliens neurally hooked up to the station’s computer – reminded me of a similar setup in the James Rollins novel Amazonia, where all kinds of animal species are found interconnected in the root system of a sentient tree. Of course Archer blew up the station at the end… it can’t be an episode of (then-) modern Star Trek without cool explosions and whatnot…
Yeah, the idea of showing the consequences of taking damage — especially after VOY’s magic resets — was fun at the time.
But I ultimately like this episode less on its own merits and more because of how vital it ended up becoming to Christopher Bennett’s Rise of the Federation novels. Using the Ware Crisis to not only establish the basis for the lack of Federation robotic/AI development in the later eras and the beginnings of the Prime Directive was a great, great stuff.
“Its owners are identified as the mysterious Ware by regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett”
Not exactly — the station itself is Ware (as in hardware/software), as are other stations and ships like it. It doesn’t have conscious minds behind it, which is exactly the thing that makes it a threat. I took the mindless nature of the station here, the idea of automated customer service taken to its dehumanizing extreme, and extrapolated it still further.
I think this is a pretty good episode, and as you can imagine, I saw a lot of untapped potential that was worth exploring further. Still, a couple of technical details really irritate me. The use of the term “warp plasma” is aggravating. Warp plasma isn’t a substance you store. It’s the ultra-hot product of matter-antimatter annihilation, the soup of short-lived subatomic particles that transmit the energy released by that annihilation from the warp reactor to the nacelles. Once it’s used up, it doesn’t exist anymore, certainly not as plasma. Plasma is matter in a high-energy, ionized gaseous state, the fourth state of matter beyond solid, liquid, and gas. Talking about “warp plasma” as something you can store cool and heat up is a contradiction in terms. Once it cools down, it isn’t plasma anymore; it becomes gas or liquid.
Then there’s another example of VGR/ENT-era Trek’s inexplicable obsession with using the word “isolytic” (which literally means “equally dissolving”) to mean various random things it couldn’t possibly apply to, like an “isolytic reaction” to neutralize antimatter radiation (VGR: “Friendship One”), an “isolytic burst” creating a subspace tear (Insurrection), or here, using “isolytic shock” for what’s quite simply an electric shock.
Voyager for sure used “iso-” as a prefix a whole bunch of times, inconsistently, and in situations that had nothing to do with “equal”. Someone on the writing staff just thought it sounded cool.
From a review of Voyager’s “Equinox”: “Voyager‘s gross misuse of the prefix “iso-” continues. In the real world, “iso-” means “equal.” In the Star Trek world, in which science and language education stop at the fourth grade level, “iso-” is used as a prefix for units of measure, and always seems to imply a large amount… But this week, Equinox‘s engineer frets about having only a few iso-grams of dilithium crystals.”
Random thought: Was this the first human-Tellarite contact, or should we assume that dozens of other ships have had tea and donuts with them before? All those freighters, puttering along a low to middling warp speed. Are the humans desperately dependent on the Vulcan database because they seem unable to make their own?
And regarding that explosive finale, obviously Archer and Tucker had prepared to detonate the plasma well in advance, before they knew about those organic processors. Did he have any choice but to push the button? He could have agonized some more, but in the end it was that or stay clamped …
@3 & 4
The misuse of Iso in Trek always bugged me less than the Voyager writers’ collective lack of understanding of interferometry… interferometric pulse this, interferometric field that… ugh.
Personally I rate this episode higher than Keith does, because despite the death of the living processors, it IS actually somewhat of a new idea in Trek… and blowing up a dozen people in a vegetative state is, to my mind, a far less callous action than, say, Kirk totally forgetting about two security officers he beamed into space.
Well, I liked this one a lot: the novel premise, the sets, the direction, the foreboding atmosphere. So I count this now as three good episodes in a row. I think the sets and the creepy computer are meant to evoke 2001: A Space Odyssey and the malevolent HAL.
I can get Krad’s gripe about blowing up the catatonic aliens on the station, but in my mind, I thought Archer was doing them all a favor. He was releasing all of those aliens from a fate worse than death: not really dead, but not truly alive either. Just existing and not allowed to pass on. That’s how I think of Borg drones as well. So Archer spared those aliens from their horrible fate. And he based his decision on what his trusted CMO told him after all!
I’m more ambivalent than @krad about NX-01’s use of explosive force; in the circumstances as depicted, Our Heroes have very little time and very little room to manoeuvre while dealing with a frighteningly powerful entity so it’s hard to fault them for deploying the only ace in the hole they have to hand (and given it was hard enough to get Captain Archer & T’Pol into the processor room, then equally-or-more tricky for those two to get out with Mr Mayweather, it’s equally difficult to imagine Our Heroes being able to retrieve those other victims in the absence of a functioning transporter*).
*When your escape plan is forced to blow up the dock your shop is currently attached to AND torpedo the very arm holding you to same (not phaser, TORPEDO) you are desperate.
Also, it bears pointing out that the crew of NX-01 did not actually welch on their bargain; they just threw in a little something extra with their payment (in the same spirit the station tried to pick up a little bonus payment without troubling itself to clear this with it’s customers).
Right, that’s my nitpicks with this rather good interview done with – I would just like to add that there’s something immensely gratifying about the set design on this station’s public areas; there’s a very Classic Sci Fi feel that somehow doesn’t feel even slightly dated (Also to note with some amusement that we seem to be only one case away from making “Any machine voiced by Roxann Dawson is automatically suspect” a hard and fast Rule of Trek*).
Oh, and I would like to submit “FLORIDA MAN looks gift horse in the mouth, sees fangs” as an Alternative Florida Man for this week. (-:
Also, I would dearly like to make a running joke about Tellarites absolutely bringing out the worst in Vulcans- couch cough SAREK – because the Tellarites are dedicated to Free Speech in a way that brings the notoriously aloof Vulcans out in hives (Tellarites playing Devil’s Advocate when there’s only one Logical alternative on point of principle*; Tellarites ALWAYS over-sharing; Tellarites regarding Vulcan cool-headedness with some respect and the Vulcan habit of either leaving things unspoken or outright withholding data with contempt**).
*That Principle being “We’re still going to discuss this because nobody can afford to take Being Right for granted”.
**I tend to think of the philosophical divide between Tellarites and Vulcans as comparable to the stereotypical ‘Blue Collar V Ivy League’ dichotomy; I keep remembering the old quote “A dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you and a pig will treat you as an equal” when thinking of the Tellarites (and I mean that as a compliment – it suggests they take people as they come, rather than assuming their own superiority pace the Vulcans & Andorians).
I like this episode and was OK with the ending. Phlox is a good doctor and if he says they’re brain dead then they’re brain dead. The only reason to quibble with that is to create a reason to criticize the decision. As far as I’m concerned, lack of sentience means It’s OK to blow them up. I see no reason to risk sentient lives for insentient shells that have no consciousness.
I’d probably be more inclined to take Phlox at his word before “Dear Doctor”. His idea of what lives are worth saving may be as dodgy on the individual level as it was on the species, and he’s been shown to be willing to lie to those who might disagree.
This is a great episode, and one of the first that really fulfilled the potential of the show for me. A really original sci-fi concept, a sort of Dickian take on “Press 1 to hear your balances” and the crew solves the problem with a fun, TOS-style plan that draws on human ingenuity rather than the technobabble deus ex machina that had become way too common in the 24th century.
Good performances from everyone, the continuity with a past episode was nice — what’s not to like? One of my favorite ENT episodes, and I think one of the better episodes of Trek.
“We’ve answered enough calls for help over the last year. It’s time someone returned the favour.”
This definitely does feel like a reaction to all those Voyager episodes that end with the ship trashed only for everything to be back to normal next week. Here, with no replicators to provide replacement parts, there’s been no magic wand waved between episodes: Enterprise is still in a bad way and Reed’s still recovering from his injuries. As Archer says, their only realistic option is to call for help…and they get it, but it’d be a dull episode if that’s all there was, so inevitably there’s a catch.
There’s a pleasing moral ambiguity about this. It’s hard to fault Enterprise for wanting to save Travis (and indeed the rest of the crew once the station stops pretending to be nice and just attacks them), and it is a satisfying moment when Reed triggers that bomb (as well as Tucker keeping the computer busy by being a difficult customer), but given that the other victims have been there for years, the repair station probably repairs dozens of ships without abducting any crew and Enterprise would have been in trouble without it. (However, branding Archer a “murderer” because he doesn’t save a bunch of people that the episode tells us were already dead by any meaningful definition just feels like looking for something to complain about, I’m afraid.) We get a sequel hook at the end, but it’d take Mr Bennett and the relaunch novels to follow up on it.
Archer definitely sells the frustration of dealing with limited automated responses. I like T’Pol’s deadpan offer to scan for gremlins. Archer restricts Tucker and Reed to quarters for their stunt…and then they’re back on duty pretty much straightaway.
Mayweather’s age is given as twenty-six. There’s a reference to his sister, who was previously mentioned in “Fortunate Son”. With him out of action, Tucker handles the helm during the climax. Tucker states scratching Enterprise in “Broken Bow” was a year ago: presumably it’s a bit more, since they celebrated the anniversary of T’Pol joining the crew two episodes ago.
I’m gonna repeat what I said in the article: not everyone there was a species Phlox was even familiar with. He has no basis whatsofuckingever for declaring all of them to be brain damaged beyond saving.
I stand by calling it murder.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@12/mschiffe and 15/krad: There’s a misunderstanding here. Archer did not base his decision on Phlox’s judgment, because Phlox wasn’t there when they found the captives. It was T’Pol who scanned the other captives and reported on their condition — specifically “They’ve suffered severe neurological damage” and “Their synaptic pathways have been reconfigured, integrated into the computer core.” Phlox’s only involvement was after the fact, when he answered Travis’s question about the other captives by telling him what T’Pol’s scans had indicated.
I think I established in my ENT novels that it was possible to retrieve someone with relatively little brain damage if it happened soon enough, but after being used for years as nothing more than a peripheral processor and extra RAM for a Big Dumb Object, the brain pathways would be overwritten beyond recognition and there’d be nothing left to save (though I don’t remember exactly how I depicted it).
I always felt they missed a golden opportunity to make this a Borg origin story as well. What if that station had been a probe sent by the people who eventually became the Borg. They were using it to gather as much information that they could about the beings in the Alpha Quadrant before doing an all-out invasion. Maybe even something about the catatonic people who were hooked up to the machine, the proto-borg eventually alos learned how to keep them alive and mobile, but still connected to the station, so that these beings would protect the station while it continued to gather information.
Actually…Fridge Logic bordering on Fridge Horror has just kicked in. Given that the stinger shows the station to be still operational and repairing itself, that suggests it’s computer processing ability is still there, and that suggests that Archer didn’t actually blow anyone up and it’s still parasiting off comatose captives. Whether that’s better or worse depends on your point of view…
Oh well, I’m sure they’re past caring either way.
@17/Joel: I hate the idea of tying the Borg’s origin to Archer or (in at least one comics story) Kirk. Having the origin of everything in Trek just happen to relate to characters we know makes the universe far too small and incestuous. Trek’s galaxy should be vast and full of unknowns, things whose origins are far beyond anything we’ve ever encountered.
Besides, prior canon established that the Borg had been around for thousands of years, not just 200. It would’ve greatly diminished them to make their origin so recent. (The comics story I mentioned used a time warp to justify it, but that’s kind of a cheat).
@18/cap-mjb:
I disagree, and interpret this as: self-repair is a known quantity (*), whereas adapting to novel spacecraft and species is what takes extra processing power. OTOH, Tucker’s entire assessment of “there’s not enough volume for the computing capability we see” is premised on known-to-Earth computing tech; it serves as dramatic foreshadowing, but could also be wrong. (This being Trek, it could’ve equally gone in the direction of “I don’t see where it keeps its brain. Oh wait, it harnesses GHOSTS from SUBSPACE. Woooeee!”)
(*) And can be handled by computers distributed amongst the facility segments. In fact, everything would need to be distributed: power supply, transporter/replicator hardware, mass buffers, RCS thrusters. “Station reassembles itself” is a creepy image, akin to body horror, until you think of the facility as a colonial organism, and the Enterprise’s attack merely fragmented it; in the same way separated cells of sponges and hydra can re-collect into a functional organism.
@17. Joel A Seely & @19. ChristopherLBennett: I tend to agree with Mr Bennett, on the understanding that Our Heroes should be the focus, but not the sum of a setting – there should be Great Events, Adventures & Occurrences that they play no major role in even during their lifetimes (Otherwise the setting becomes sharply limited and even rather flat).
I’m willing to believe that Federation ships named Enterprise always have the most colourful adventures, but not that they’re the only vessels (in Starfleet or elsewhere) whose adventures matter in the Galaxy.
@15. krad: Were I a sitting judge and you brought a case of manslaughter against the command team of NX-01 I might well bring the case to trial (though one feels that the extenuating circumstances of being trapped by an enormously powerful threat that was demonstratively capable of taking their ship apart and facing dramatically small odds of escape could well be argued into an exoneration).
We’re you to make a case for murder, I would have no hesitation in throwing it out entirely – there is clearly no malice aforethought on the part of Captain Archer et al (not least because they clearly had no idea that the station had a whole cell bloc of extraterrestrials, nor did they have the opportunity to make a more detailed analysis than the hurried scan made by T’Pol and they certainly did not have the personnel on-hand to attempt more than the rescue of Ensign Mayweather; further, while one might reasonably question whether Doctor Phlox had enough data to make a fully informed decision I think it highly unreasonable to question the competence of a Doctor who has successfully treated multiple species – note that he’s worked with Humans, Vulcans and rather more than one other species even in the relatively small amount of time he’s been on camera – to make an assessment of the viability of the unlucky specimens).
I’m prepared to accept that NX-01 caused a great deal of damage in the process of it’s escape, but not that it’s senior officers made any kind of unreasonable, malicious and unjustifiable decision under the circumstances.
@19,
Yeah, for me, the Borg’s origins are not unlike the Joker’s origin in the Batman comics: I’m not interested in seeing that story being told.
Part of the Borg’s mystique is wondering how this nightmarish race of cybernetic locusts came about. Is this what the first Borg intended when the Collective came into being? Did good intentions go off the rails and out of control?
(That said, I did appreciate David Mack’s crack at telling the Borg’s Alpha and Omega in Destiny).
Here’s my take on the Episode, Station and Ware. The station and Ware are connected to the Borg indirectly. We know that canon wise the Borg have existed for thousands of years, but at least 900 years ago had only assimilated a handful of species. Perhaps the Borg from Regeneration accessed the computers on the Enterprise and downloaded data and logs from this episode and that was part of the message sent at the end of Regeneration. Suppose the Borg were able to access this transmission relatively quickly and used the data to either acquire or enhance their regeneration technology. Don’t forget that the Hirogen communication network extended to the Alpha Quadrant and it’s possible that the Borg of the 22nd century were using this network to find new species to assimilate.
@23/Charles Rosenberg: But if the Borg already exist and already draw technology from multiple origins, what’s the point of saying they cribbed something from the repair station as well? It seems like a token gesture, a totally unnecessary effort that adds nothing to either entity.
One thing I did in my novels about the Ware was to make it as clear as possible that they didn’t have a damn thing to do with the Borg and were nothing like them despite superficial appearances. I hate the assumption that resemblance requires connection or common origin. The universe just doesn’t work that way. Good grief, on Earth alone, the eye evolved independently something like eight separate times in different branches of life.
Besides, the Borg have been done to death. Tying the Ware into the Borg would’ve been boring and obvious. It was a far more interesting creative challenge to come up with a fresh, distinctive origin for it, to make the Ware a radically different kind of threat from the Borg.
I always liked this one (relative to other early ENT episodes), mostly for the reasons that KRAD points out. Actual continuity! Consequences for actions! Roxann Dawson! Given the time crunch they were under, and that T’Pol and Phlox both seemed to agree that there wasn’t anything that could be done, I’m actually OK with the outcome. I think “you aren’t always going to be able to save everyone” is something Trek didn’t always do well (there was A LOT of having their cake and eating it too- especially coming off of Voyager), but I think is realistic. I
@19 –
“Having the origin of everything in Trek just happen to relate to characters we know makes the universe far too small and incestuous. Trek’s galaxy should be vast and full of unknowns, things whose origins are far beyond anything we’ve ever encountered.
Besides, prior canon established that the Borg had been around for thousands of years, not just 200. It would’ve greatly diminished them to make their origin so recent. (The comics story I mentioned used a time warp to justify it, but that’s kind of a cheat).”
You’re literally describing the Destiny novel trilogy.
Yeah, I don’t see the appeal in the tying of new elements to established ones like the Borg, Section 31, Khan, etc. One thing that originally drew me to Star Trek, and science fiction in general, was how BIG and mysterious it could feel.
Just like when the Alien franchise ties it all back to Earth and humanity, uh, why? It’s not alien when you do that.
Always enjoy this episode when I rewatch. Always thought revisiting the station in another episode/series would also have been interesting to find the origins.
As I said in the Minefield page, just the idea of doing a pseudo-Year of Hell approach and actually have consequences to what happened on that episode was a welcome change for Trek. Rather than Voyager the catastrophy away, they dealt with it.
And for what it’s worth, I liked the concept of searching for help and walking headfirst into what’s essentially an artificial haunted house. A nice setup from Sussman and Strong, expertly directed by Dawson. The ending itself, I kind of blocked out Phlox and Archer’s reasoning for blowing the place up. I’d completely forgotten about the brain-damaged condition of the bodies. I figured the big reason for blowing it up was to remove a potential threat that other ships might come across. A ‘needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few’ situation.
Another angle: if the space station is being run by the prisoners’ brains, then when the station attacks the Enterprise, the coma people are the enemy. So the moral position is about the same as meeting family or friends who became Borg since you last saw them. So, not friends any more. If this is before we saw Borg treated as an alternative lifestyle choice – without the “life” and “choice” parts, though, strictly speaking.
Another angle: if the space station is being run by the prisoners’ brains, then when the station attacks the Enterprise, the coma people are the enemy. So the moral position is about the same as meeting family or friends who became Borg since you last saw them. So, not friends any more. If this is before we saw Borg treated as an alternative lifestyle choice – without the “life” and “choice” parts, though, strictly speaking.
I am going third or fourth the statement that this episode is primarily awesome for the fact it led to THE RISE OF THE FEDERATION stories by Christopher Bennett about the Ware. I wasn’t 100% behind the handling of the “Silent Enemy” story (sorry, I much preferred the more malevolent version of the race as presented in Star Trek Online) but the Ware storyline is one of the best in all of Star Trek Literature, IMHO.
However, I’m going to say I almost regret that this episode did become a Haunted House because I actually was most fascinated by the general concept of it: “What sort of gas stations exist in the galaxy?” I mean, that is a WEIRD thing to say but I think @Christopher and @krad might agree. Just the very concept of what sort of people repair ships, change oil, and refuel your dilithium (recrystalize?) in the 22nd Century.
One of the failures of ENT was the fact it never really gave us a sense of the world like TOS, TNG, and DS9 did. VOY it’s about equal on. “Who are the major powers?” “How does commerce work?” and so on. A gas station is “small world building” but very important and I almost wish we’d gotten more of it and less of the murder/kidnapping plot.
@32/rja-carnegie: “if the space station is being run by the prisoners’ brains”
It’s more like the prisoners’ brains are being run by the space station. As T’Pol said, their neural pathways had been reconfigured and integrated into the computer core. Their brains are a passive, supplemental part of the system, basically just peripherals for extra memory and processing power. They’re more or less the equivalent of Voyager‘s bio-neural gel packs.
I took the, “severe neurological damage” as meaning the other captives were likely beyond help, and at least trying to destroy the station was not just to get away, but to keep any others from having such a fate befall them. Basically, Archer’s actions didn’t bother me to any great degree. They seemed entirely reasonable under the circumstances, and this was another pretty good episode.
I did kind of chuckle on the rewatch that the station computer managed to pick as its kidnapping victim one of the credited characters that would most likely not be missed had the show continued on without them.
I also disagree with @krad.
Since most species are close enough to breed in Star Trek, I don’t think that biologies are going to be so different Phlox can’t tell who is brain dead or not.
One more time, everyone: Archer based his decision to blow up the station on T’Pol‘s assessment of the captives’ brain damage. Phlox was back on the ship at the time. The credit/blame for the brain damage report lies exclusively with T’Pol, not Phlox. All Phlox did was to show up in the denouement and tell Travis what T’Pol’s readings had shown.
One problem is that in Star Trek, science officers are shown as being experts in EVERYTHING. Geology, astrophysics, botany, you name it. So it’s not surprising that T’Pol’s word is good enough for Archer. She’s the science officer so her word on pretty much anything even tangental connected to science is taken as gospel. Spock, Data, Dax, Janeway and the rest are guilty of the same thing.
Oh dear. I thought we had more time before that turkey.
But anyway, I knew KRAD would dislike this episode and I knew why. Fortunately, I’m a cold-hearted person, so I just took T’Pol at her word that the people were too far gone to save. I do agree though that it would have felt a bit more Star Trek if they’d managed to pull it off anyway. Oh well.
Jeembus, this site really is going thru with a guy who hates Enterprise reviewing all 98 episodes with maximum outraged sanctimony.
To be fair, KRAD did warn everyone that he disliked Voyager and Enterprise, but they all begged him to do this rewatch anyway.
@38 Actually, what Spock and all his sciences officers compatriots are good at are boiling down all the precise scientific terminology that’s being poured into their ears by their staff and putting it into easily digestible forms for their commanding officer. It just seems like one person doing all the work because it’s dramatically more interesting.
@40 I mean, it’s rare to find someone who actually LIKES all of Enterprise. I feel he has been fair, and acknowledges that other people like any particular episode. He also points out a episode’s good traits and it’s flaws.
Linda Shark: After rewatching the original series, TNG, and DS9 for this site, I moved on to other things, even though people were constantly asking me to do Voyager next. I finally did do Voyager three years later, and I’m glad I did, as I came away with a much greater appreciation of the show rewatching it 25 years later than I did in the late 1990s.
At that point, to not rewatch Enterprise would be ridiculous, since I’d done all the other pre-2017 shows in rewatch form, and have been reviewing the new episodes of the various Paramount+ shows as they’ve come out over the last five years. To leave out Enterprise would be a rather large gap.
Unfortunately, a lot of the problems I had with Enterprise in the early days of the new millennium remain a problem in 2022, but I’m continuing to live in hope. As it is, I’ve found some unexpected gems (“Shuttlepod One,” “Vox Sola,” “Detained,” “Minefield”), and I know I’ll find more, especially in season four.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@@@@ 42 – Sure, if that’s your head canon but what we actually saw was the science officer coming up with stuff on their own, particularly on landing parties. No matter what they came across, the science officer would appear to be an expert in it.
Sure, it’s for dramatic reasons but it just doesn’t make any logical sense. McCoy could be stymied by a medical problem but the science officers very rarely were.
I’m on the side of giving the coppertops’ future quality of life at or near vegetable level as assessed by T’Pol as 100% correct. With that being said, if it was me as a braindead battery, I’d want to be blown up too thank you very much.
With that out of the way, I love this episode. I’m a big Twilight Zone fan and this has a beautiful TZ style ending. I also loved Archer ‘agreeing’ with Reed’s complaint from “Minefield” that discipline on the ship is a bit lax. Bakula’s delivery was hilarious.
I do feel it would have been a better ending if the fate of the other captives hadn’t been glossed over so cavalierly — if they’d at least made more effort than a cursory scan to determine if any of the others could be saved, and if it had been written so that at least one or two of the others could have been rescued. As it was, it felt like the script rushed through the story beat to get to the ending, and it did make Archer and T’Pol seem a little callous. But I blame that on the writers, not the characters.
@40 It isn’t KRAD’s fault that a lot of Enterprise– especially early Enterprise, wasn’t very good (same with Voyager). I doubt you’d be able to find someone with similar knowledge of Star Trek and writing capability at Mr. DeCandido who also thought seasons 1 and 2 of ENT were really great. While I don’t always agree with his assessments of individual episodes or characters, as I’ve said in my earlier comments, KRAD is pretty fair about them and the comments section has always been an open space for people to (politely) disagree with him- and he is always very gracious with his responses.
@47. ChristopherLBennett: I tend to agree – if nothing else it’s hard to fault T’Pol for making a snap judgement when she’s in the middle of a hostage rescue mission with precisely ONE other rescuer on it (and where bringing in more crew is a dicey proposition, given that they’re ALSO in the middle of trying to get their ship and every member of that crew away from the excessively powerful space-station they’re currently docked at).
Given those circumstances, I find it hard to call Captain Archer & Sub-commander T’Pol’s actions unreasonable.
This is one of the early season gems as far as I’m concerned. It was a great premise and very memorable. As to the moral quandary it seemed like some of those bodies were mostly dead. Must’ve been horrible to have your brain overwritten. While I don’t have any suspicion of the crew not doing enough, maybe an attempt and failure would’ve been appropriate.
I’m more forgiving to the mass murder, because the episode otherwise is pretty good and of course a Vulcan tricorder will just show if someone is braindead or not because the device is that awesome. :)
And seems to me that they borrowed some ideas from the Matrix. it’s almost as ridiculuously dumb as there, but it’s still a somewhat better idea that they use the abducted folks brains as an upgrade to their computer instead of using their bodies as a power plant.
I liked it, though Tucker (3rd in command) and Reed acting like curious kids sneaking behind their parents’ backs was annoying and unprofessional. It only kinda fits them, cause even Archer reminds Reed that he thought there needed to be discipline. It fits their Risa characters from recently though.
I’d give it a 6-7?