Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura on the original Star Trek and its spinoff movies, and who advocated for more women and people of color to join NASA for decades, passed away over the weekend. This edition of the Enterprise Rewatch is dedicated to her memory. Rest in peace, great lady.
“The Communicator”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga and André Bormanis
Directed by James Contner
Season 2, Episode 8
Production episode 034
Original air date: November 13, 2002
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Archer, Reed, and Sato return from an observation mission on a planet that hasn’t achieved faster-than-light travel yet. (In fact, they haven’t split the atom yet.) Unfortunately, after they’re cleared through decon, Reed realizes that he no longer has his communicator.
They look everywhere on board the ship and the shuttlepod, and nobody can find it—which means he must have left it on the planet. Sato is able to use the “find my phone” option to track it to a particular area, which includes a tavern they all visited.
Archer and Reed put their prosthetics back on and head down to the surface. They track the communicator to the back room of the tavern, where they’re ambushed by a military contingent led by General Gosis, who believes them to be Alliance spies.
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They’re imprisoned and interrogated. At first, the prisoners say nothing, as it’s safest to not say a word than risk any further cultural and technological contamination—which is exacerbated by Gosis and his people now having phase pistols and scanners to go with their communicator.
Tucker is getting antsy, and T’Pol agrees to try to contact Archer. However, there’s no response, even though there’s an open line on the other end. T’Pol then orders Sato to try to locate their bio-signs. They’re in a large, densely populated city, so it won’t be easy, but Sato give it a shot.
Archer and Reed’s recalcitrance leads to Gosis having his people beat the two of them up, which has the unfortunate side effect of a) messing up their forehead prosthetics and b) making them bleed red. This freaks the general out on several levels, and he immediately orders a medical examination of both of them.
Tucker reminds T’Pol that they still have a Suliban cell ship, and while Tucker hasn’t doped it all out yet, he’s really close. He and Mayweather go off to futz with it. Unfortunately, a console goes blooey and irradiates Tucker’s right arm with the radiation that is used to cloak the ship, and now he can’t see his own arm. Nor can it be detected.
Gosis confronts Archer and Reed with their peculiar biology, and finally they “come clean” by saying they’re genetically enhanced Alliance spies with experimental technology. Gosis and his people scream, “I knew it!” and jump up and down enthusiastically.
The doctor who examined them can’t confirm their story without looking at their internal organs much more closely, so Gosis condemns them to be hanged so they can film an episode of Alien Autopsy…
Sato picks up an announcement of the execution of two Alliance spies, at which point T’Pol orders Tucker and Mayweather to finish their work en route. As they fly down, they’re shot at by military aircraft before they can finally cloak the thing.
They land at the gallows just before Archer and Reed have their necks stretched out. Archer is able to retrieve all their technology before they bugger off back into space. Archer is glad they were able to get their tech back, but the damage was done, as Gosis and his people now believe the Alliance has genetically enhanced super-soldiers with fancy-shmancy weapons and stuff, which will severely affect the balance of power.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Tucker has had the cell ship for more than a year, but he doesn’t get it all working right until he needs it to rescue his CO. It’s all about motivation, I guess.
The gazelle speech. Archer tries his best to keep the cultural contamination to a minimum. He almost succeeds.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol is way more willing to take risks to rescue Archer and Reed than she probably would’ve been a year earlier…
Florida Man. Florida Man Has Unique Workplace Accident.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox is unable to do much with Tucker’s cloaked arm, mostly by dint of his instruments not being able to read that there’s even an arm there…
I’ve got faith…
“Captain, my carelessness was inexcusable. I’m prepared for whatever reprimand you feel is appropriate.”
“How about thirty years in the brig? Or maybe a good flogging?”
–Reed putting himself at Archer’s mercy, and Archer taking the piss.
Welcome aboard. All three billed guest stars are Trek veterans. Francis Guinan, who plays Gosis, previously played Kray in Voyager’s “Ex Post Facto” and Zar in Voyager’s “Live Fast and Prosper.” Gosis’ aide Pell is played by Tim Kelleher, who previously played Gaines in TNG’s “All Good Things…” and P’Chan/Four of Nine in Voyager’s “Survival Instinct.” And Dennis Cockrum plays the bartender, having also previously appeared in Voyager’s “Live Fast and Prosper” as Orek, and also been a freighter captain in TNG’s “Face of the Enemy.”
Trivial matters: The plot of this episode was inspired by the gag ending of the original series’ “A Piece of the Action,” when McCoy realized he left his communicator behind on Sigma Iotia. That was never followed up onscreen, but it did lead to this story taking place a hundred years earlier.
Enterprise has apparently had the Suliban cell ship sitting in their cargo bay for over a year, since capturing it in “Broken Bow.” Why it wasn’t sent back to Earth so that a dedicated group of engineers could work on it full time is left as an exercise for the viewer.
It’s been a long road… “General, his blood—it’s red!” Ye flipping gods, what a boring episode. Trek has done this type of story many times before, where the crew has to deal with a pre-warp society and do their best not to influence it (not always successfully) and remove their technology (again, not always successfully), from the original series’ “Tomorrow is Yesterday” to TNG’s “First Contact” to SNW’s “Strange New Worlds,” and “The Communicator” is by far the least interesting iteration of this particular plot.
Seriously, just writing the plot description had me bored to tears. Absolutely nothing interesting happens in this episode. I mean, it doesn’t help that the plot is, basically, Reed left his cell phone behind. It’s never made clear at any point why they don’t use the transporter to just beam the communicator back up once they’ve got it located.
Tucker’s arm being cloaked might have been fun if they actually did something with it, but it’s just a gag to fill out time in an episode that doesn’t have enough plot for an hour, mostly because we don’t really get to know the society that Enterprise has theoretically contaminated with Reed’s inability to keep things in his pocket. All we see is one bartender, who sounds just like a human bartender, and a bunch of hidebound military officers who sound and act just like every stereotypical military officer in dramatic fiction. There’s nothing new here, which would be fine if any of it was interesting, but it’s all just a generic plot with generic characters having a generic adventure. The society—which scripter André Bormanis can’t even summon up the energy to name—is interchangeable with any other Forehead Aliens we’ve seen on Trek. We don’t even have the deliberate parallel with humans that we had in “First Contact” and “Strange New Worlds,” because there’s no plot reason for these never-named people to be human-like.
They didn’t even pick up on the important part of their inspiration. A big reason why the ending of “A Piece of the Action” was so amusing was because the Iotians were an imitative culture, and their getting their hands on Federation technology could prove disastrous as much for that reason. But these people (seriously, why couldn’t they give them a name?) don’t even have that, they just have a boring Cold War-esque relationship with some other nation that it’s impossible to give even a little bit of a damn about.
Warp factor rating: 4
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I would have given it a couple more warp factors, even if it was yet another break-the-prime-directive (even if we haven’t invented it yet) episode. How many of them did TOS have?
What I found nice to see was T’Pol in command. She was in command, she was able to go to her human subordinates for advice, and her subordinates backed decisions that were ultimately hers to make. Was it because Reed was away, or the crew getting to work more smoothly?
They actually did activate the cloaking device before they met the interceptors. It was just failing again because the cell went to a default power management configuration for atmospheric flight.
Regarding cultural contamination, they got the electronics and (some? all?) x-rays. They did not get the blood samples. I wonder how far their biochemistry is, and if they will discover whatever-they-use-for-DNA anytime soon.
I remember appreciating that this episode didn’t take sides in the primitive planet’s simmering conflict, though storywise, that may be more of a bug than a feature.
I actually found this one of the more interesting ones in concept, in the way it shows the crew making a big mistake — but it disappoints me that they screw up while trying to honor the principle of non-interference. I always hoped that a Trek series set before the Prime Directive would show the characters interfering openly and finding it had harmful consequences, to help explain why the Directive was created.
What happens here is the opposite of that. It’s actually a good argument against the Prime Directive, since Archer and Reed ultimately did much more harm by trying to hide the truth than they would’ve done by revealing it. The point of such a directive isn’t just to keep people in the dark about aliens, period — it’s to minimize the disruption you cause to their society. The former is just a means toward the latter. This is a case where denying their alien identity — and creating the fiction that the enemy had bred supersoldiers — created far more disruption than the truth would have. I mean, the natives (and it’s inconvenient that they were never given a name — I had to dance around it when I mentioned this episode in my ENT novels) arrived at the conclusion they were aliens on their own. So it wasn’t an external idea being imposed on them, it was something they figured out fair and square and were able and ready to accept (well, at least the military was). Archer should’ve recognized that and fessed up. I commend the episode for having the courage to show its characters fumbling and making mistakes with major consequences, but it’s still frustrating to watch Archer missing the point so badly.
The slapstick of Trip’s disappearing hand was kind of problematical for me. That’s not really how cloaking is supposed to work. But I suppose I could buy it if it’s some sort of holographic camouflage, maybe a cloud of nanites projecting a view of what’s on the other side. Yeah, that could work.
Here’s hoping Tor.com does a little more to honor Nichelle Nichols passing. Deadlines and all notwithstanding.
@@@@@ #5. https://www.tor.com/2022/08/01/remembrances-nichelle-nichols-1932-2022/
Yeah, season 2 in general was a bit of an unmemorable trudge, but this one in particular escapes me entirely. I remember nothing of it other than the fact that it exists, and I know I watched it back in the day.
I like this one a bit more than season 1’s Civilization. That episode was mainly an excuse for Archer to kiss an alien girl. At least The Communicator builds upon the original Piece of the Action premise, where a small mistake leads to series of far bigger ones (though the end result with Gosis and the Alliance becoming even more belligerent is somewhat reminiscent of a much better VOY episode: Dragon’s Teeth). So, it’s worth the initial viewing. I’d say there’s nothing inherently wrong with this one, but it still feels rehashed and uninspired. At least it has that funny scene of Archer and Reed “coming clean” to their captors.
I had the same reaction as CLB on this one. It really does seem that, after the cat is out of the bag, you’d be doing less harm by admitting you’re visiting aliens on a peaceful mission of exploration than making up a story about being genetically enhanced super-spies with advanced technology sent by the other side in some sort of cold war scenario. The latter is likely to stir up a hot war, whereas the former, while certainly a big deal, is probably something a civilization would be able to handle. It’s not like these people would have worshiped Archer and crew as gods or something. They were advanced enough to understand the concept.
@8/David Pirtle: Right. The point of the Prime Directive is to respect other people’s freedom of choice and not force your decisions on them. Lying to them about being aliens when they’ve already figured out that you’re aliens is the opposite of that. That’s not respect, it’s gaslighting.
This one was definitely a snoozer. The only thing that might have saved it would have been to enlist the help of Commander Shran.
I think McCoy’s communicator was directly followed up on in the Star Trek NES game.
Can’t 22nd century Earth make gadgets that are biodegradable, or, would that contaminate alien planets even more? I suppose a world where mutated communicators are the dominant life form would be an undesirable outcome.
crzydroid: There have been several followups to McCoy’s leaving his phone behind in “A Piece of the Action” in ancillary works. I mentioned several of them in that episode’s rewatch.
https://www.tor.com/2016/03/08/star-trek-the-original-series-a-piece-of-the-action/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“You don’t have to leave technology behind to contaminate a culture.”
As with ‘Dear Doctor’ and a number of other previous episodes, instead of showing us why the Prime Directive was needed, this episode acts as if the Prime Directive already exists, as if no-one working on the show has any idea how to write for a Starfleet that isn’t obsessed with non-interference and “cultural contamination”.
It starts out okay. It’s understandable that the crew don’t want to leave advanced technology lying around for anyone to find, take apart and duplicate. And it’s understandable that Archer wouldn’t immediately tell their captors the truth and instead would try to act like an innocent bystander. But as the episode goes on, and the characters stick blinkerdly to the plan to not tell anyone who they are whatever the cost, the rationale gets dumber. As has been pointed out, the turning point is when Gosis and his people actually work out that their visitors are another species and came there in a vessel from a larger ship. That’s the point to give up and go “It’s a fair cop, guv.” Instead, Archer claims…they’re enemy spies, which is possibly the worst thing he could have done. There’s absolutely no reason for it, and the attempts to argue there is with a lot of patronising talk about “protecting” them from the truth never really ring true. Gosis and company aren’t having psychological breakdowns at their worldview being expanded, they’ve grasped the concept quite well. Heck, Archer admitted the truth to Riaan in ‘Civilisation’ and she was from an even less technologically-advanced society. I realise there’s a difference between letting one ordinary person know and filling in the representatives of a local major power, but it still seems absurdly dogmatic.
So, at the end, instead of knowing they were visited by alien observers, the soldiers think the opposing power bloc have genetically engineered soldiers, phased weapons and stealth ships…which seems far worse. Even Archer’s attempt to pass them off as unique prototypes falls apart when undisguised crewmembers rescue him with advanced weapons. This is like Quark and company in ‘Little Green Men’ telling the Americans that they’re Russians who’ve been genetically modified to pilot that advanced scout ship they found.
It’s a nice character moment to have Reed beating himself up over his mistake while Archer is willing to shrug it off. Tucker chafes at being left behind on the ship again. Reed states this was his first visit to a pre-warp culture. There’s some confused staging at the end where the cell ship appears to land inside a building: If it’s meant to be open air, there’s absolutely nothing in the set design to suggest it. We actually have non-speaking crewmembers manning the helm and tactical while Reed’s off the ship and Tucker and Mayweather are busy elsewhere!
@14/cap-mjb: “There’s some confused staging at the end where the cell ship appears to land inside a building: If it’s meant to be open air, there’s absolutely nothing in the set design to suggest it.”
Sure there is:
The ground is dirt rather than a floor. There’s a window with awnings in the wall beside it, something you wouldn’t have in a wall between adjoining indoor rooms.
And here you see a set of second-story windows in the wall behind the gallows, with thick, angled sills of a sort you’d only see on an outside wall.
Also, how often do you see indoor gallows?
RE: The prime directive (wait, is that capitalized?)
While i also land on the “bland but like slightly fetid water” side regarding the episode in general, I think it fits pretty well into the narrative about the prime directive in general. People don’t come up with a blanket rule like the PD without a bunch of people screwing up something. A lot. In a lot of ways. Then, the higher-ups are like ‘no more!.’ This was, as several point out, a better opportunity to ‘break’ the PD rather than hold so fast to it that you cause even more disruption. But back up to the big picture, it’s just one of many screw-ups that would lead people to say “All right. We can’t let people ad-lib this anymore. We just have to land on one side of this and make a rule about it. Let’s look at all the cases we know about and figure something out, because it can’t keep continuing like this.”
What if the PD is just the alpha quadrant version of having to put “careful! hot!” on a cup of 200 degree coffee, or plaintive pictograph cries to not use your hair dryer in the shower?
@16/Autochef: “People don’t come up with a blanket rule like the PD without a bunch of people screwing up something.”
Of course, but that’s exactly the conceptual problem with this episode. It’s not a case where the crew interfered in a way that screwed things up for the locals, prompting the creation of a rule against interference. It’s a case where the crew screwed things up by obeying the existing Vulcan rule against interference. So it does the exact opposite of what a pre-Prime Directive story should do.
@15
As public hangings in the UK became so chaotic with huge crowds attending to watch and jeer and party generally, the gallows were placed in the prisons (in the Old Bailey) in specific rooms known, with dark humour, as topping sheds.
A good description of a public execution can be found in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman’s Lady and I’m told the depiction of one in Michael Crichton’s film The Great Train Robbery is accurate.
@18/a-j: Yes, indoor gallows are not unprecedented, but my point is that they’re generally more likely to be outdoors, so that’s one of the things in the set design suggesting it, if perhaps a bit more ambiguously than the other clues.
They certainly could’ve done a better job to simulate outdoor lighting, or inserted an establishing shot with an open sky matted in. But there were indeed suggestions in the set design.
@15/CLB: “How often do you see indoor gallows?”
Very often, as @18 pointed out, which was what really led me to believe that they were indoors. This wasn’t a public execution in front of a baying crowd. This was a behind-closed-doors execution being done with only officials present. Which are usually done indoors, just like people don’t tend to get the electric chair or lethal injections outside.
(See also the Doctor Who story “Vengeance on Varos”.)
I feel like this episode chickened out and should have gone the full monty.
* Have it be a two parter
* Have them arrive on the planet at crisis point
* Have the crew not necessarily cause it but not help as the planet goes into nuclear war
* HAVE THAT CAUSE THE PRIME DIRECTIVE
Stargate SG-1 did it. They had them arrive and thus cause a resurgence of Gould worship that led to the end of the world.
Rest in peace, Lady Nichelle.
Not much to add here; this one was indeed really boring. I do hope this planet didn’t suffer a global conflict; they hadn’t split the atom at this point so maybe this species wasn’t condemned to destroy themselves after Archer’s inexplicable decision to feed into that nation-state’s paranoia.
I have, in the past spoken (and will in the future speak) in defence of Jonathan Archer as a decent man and a fairly obvious Starfleet Captain Mark 1 (a flawed but generally functional prototype that will obviously be improved upon by future models): In this episode the only way for him to have screwed the pooch even harder would have involved an act of gross indecency towards Porthos.
So acute was his bone-headedness that it would take the genetic engineering of a Klingon will an entirely solid skull to match him! Worse, Mr Reed actually supports his outrageously provocative cover story rather than keeping his own d*** mouth shut (Either out of diehard loyalty or sheer embarrassment) – and I’m not very impressed by Mr Tucker’s bizarre failure to consider that the Suliban cloaking device might work a little better if the ship were properly buttoned up (It may be a little unfair, but the fact they kept trying to get the cloaking device working while the door was open just bugged me – based on the suspicion that one would need to ‘complete the circuit’ so to speak).
T’Pol, however, remains awesome; it is very, very difficult not to read her remark about the next star system they visit being uninhabited as an understated rebuke for Captain Archer making such a mess that his foolishness actually registers on the Gill Scale.*
*That’s right, fellow readers, the Good Captain was such a dunce about First Contact that I invented – and named for the late John Gill, a historian so foolhardy he applied the lessons of Adolf Hitler to an alien culture as something other than a warning from history and helped precipitate a whole d*** war in consequence – a scale by which we can measure violations of the Prime Directive and/or basic common sense in First Contact situations to help measure my indignation.
In this case the Ekos situation ranks as a clear ‘1’ on the Gill Scale (“We have Nazis in Space, they’re about to start a war and it’s OUR fault”), FIRST CONTACT is an equally clear 0.01 (“No fuss, no muss, we have some nice new friends … well, we have some new friends anyway”).
On this scale I’d rank Archer’s little incident somewhere in the 0.7-0.84 range (Possibly at the lower end, courtesy of his making every reasonable effort to make sure that at least the local Power wasn’t able to reverse-engineer any Future Guns when in a position to do so; on the other hand his boneheaded stubbornness in refusing to do anything but exacerbate local tensions by catering to Cold War paranoia and risking a war in the process AFTER he’d been identified as an alien suggests a higher number might be more accurate).
On a less vitriolic note, there were some elements of this episode that I quite liked:-
– As mentioned, T’Pol remains a pillar of strength.
– Doctor Phlox’s solution to Mr Tucker’s little problem is quite possibly the most beautifully understated “Well obviously” display of common sense to appear in an episode built on some very bad decisions by Captain Archer.
– I actually thought the scene where Captain Archer & Mr Reed discuss their oncoming fate to be quite affecting, despite the poor judgement that led to it (and I also liked the speed with which the locals put together the facts about Archer & Reef’s true identity; I’m a little on the fence about their willingness to ignore the facts in favour of their own biases, but in all honesty this element of characterisation DOES bolster the sense that this Cold War tension is very real, not mere brinksmanship).
– I also find Archer’s adherence to a very Vulcan philosophy on First Contact with pre-Warp cultures an interesting (and unstated) display of the way in which the captain’s resentment of Vulcans has generally been complicated by his having been very much shaped by their influence on his ethics & standard operating procedures.
I sometimes wonder if the Good Captain would resent individual Vulcans so much if he had less of a desire to beat them at their own game.
One last thought: It strikes me that this episode would have been much improved had the revelation that Archer & Reed were aliens followed, rather than preceded their being condemned to death as spies – show the General put the facts together (with help of his subordinates), then deliberately suppress these findings on the grounds that the big local war is ‘inevitable’ (and the understanding that a Big War in the near future will be to HIS advantage, whatever happens, especially with these shiny new toys to play with and no alien owners to repossess them).
This would, I think, help make Captain Archer seem infinitely less pig-headed and give the episode a much stronger villain.
@24/ED: “Doctor Phlox’s solution to Mr Tucker’s little problem is quite possibly the most beautifully understated “Well obviously” display of common sense to appear in an episode built on some very bad decisions by Captain Archer.”
If you mean putting a glove over his invisible hand, I didn’t care for that, because it requires the invisibility effect to be something skintight, which doesn’t really make sense in the context of how cloaking is supposed to work, as a field that bends light around an object. 22nd-century cloaking in particular should not be so advanced that it can be skintight and affect only part of a person’s body. That was just silly as hell.
@25. ChristopherLBennett: You say that as if it were a bad thing. (-;
I cannot speak for the Science of that particular moment, but I do love that it’s a wonderfully low-tech solution to a spectacularly high-tech problem (of the sort one would expect to be very common in the NX-01 era) and therefore also a nice subversion of our expectations when it comes to STAR TREK.
@25: Are you happier if Trip’s hand goes on being invisible – but inside the glove? That is what happens when I wear gloves. :-)
@27/Robert Carnegie: “Are you happier if Trip’s hand goes on being invisible – but inside the glove?”
What? That’s exactly what did happen in the episode, and as I said, it’s implausible that the invisibility mechanism would be skintight enough that the glove would go “over” it and remain visible. It seems more likely that a cloaking field would be similar to a deflector shield, a “bubble” of some sort bending light around the ship. So the effect would begin some distance away from the surface, and anything flush against the surface — fitting like a glove, literally — would be inside the field and thus would also be invisible, or at least visually distorted if it’s on the fringes of the field.
More fundamentally, it’s implausible that anyone interacting with the ship could somehow “catch” invisibility from it and have a body part remain invisible even away from the mechanism on the ship that generates the field. Unless, as I suggested above, it’s some kind of nanotech fluid layer or something that projects an image of what’s behind it. But Phlox said it was “particle radiation,” which makes no sense.
Sounded like a boring set up at the start but I enjoyed this one once it got going. The military types were run of the mill and as usual our heroes got bashed around (but were perfectly fine five minutes later. They never have trouble speaking, for example, after being hit in the face.)
Reed and Archer didn’t confess to being aliens because they didn’t think they would be believed. The genetic modification explanation was indeed found more plausible by the military types.
I found there to be a mismatch between us seeing Archer and Reed peeling off prosthetics and references in the script to them being surgically altered.
Trip’s invisible hand was ok as a joke though I could have done without the ‘fnar fnar’ bit between him and Travis about it.
Liked the rescue scene. It’s a good thing for our heroes that enemies in these scenarios never call for backup.