“Canamar”
Written by John Shiban
Directed by Allen Kroeker
Season 2, Episode 17
Production episode 043
Original air date: February 26, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise comes across the shuttlepod that Archer and Tucker took to make first contact with the Enolians. But the pod is empty and drifting, and shows signs of a struggle. T’Pol immediately has Mayweather set a course for Keto-Enol.
As for Archer and Tucker, they’ve been taken prisoner, accused of being smugglers and are on a prison transport to Canamar, an Enolian prison planet. Tucker is stuck sitting next to a tiresomely talkative alien named Zoumas and sitting in front of a snotty Nausicaan who tries to steal his food.
T’Pol speaks to an Enolian authority figure that the script never bothers to name, so I’m just gonna call him “Tom,” because the actor playing him kinda looks like Tom Berenger a little. Anyhow, T’Pol explains the situation, and “Tom” is actually sympathetic and helpful, which makes him unique among authority figures in this type of TV story.
The prison transport gets the message that Archer and Tucker aren’t really smugglers, but before they can be freed, another prisoner named Kuroda stages an uprising with the Nausicaan. Unfortunately for Kuroda, the Nausicaan critically injures the pilot, which leaves them with nobody to fly the ship—
—until Archer volunteers. He plays the part of a smuggler (now saying that he was being freed because he bribed the Enolian officials), and sucks up to Kuroda while quickly teaching himself how to fly the transport. When Enolian officials go after them, Archer manages to cripple the ships by igniting plasma instead of destroying them. His argument to Kuroda is that a murder charge is way worse than a smuggling charge (or a prison break charge), and Kuroda actually agrees with him, making him unique among bad guys in this type of TV story.
“Tom” explains to T’Pol that now that they know that Kuroda hijacked the ship, they’re going to shoot to kill. He recommends that Enterprise find the transport first if they want their captain and chief engineer alive.
Kuroda reads Archer in on his plan: to rendezvous with a ship at Tamaal and then put the transport in a decaying orbit. It’ll blow up, and the Enolians will think they all died in the explosion.
Now realizing he needs to take action, Archer convinces Kuroda to free Tucker so he can repair the docking port, which was damaged in the firefight with the Enolian authorities. This comes to Tucker as something of a relief, as Zoumas will not shut up…
Tucker uses that repair as cover to whack the Nausicaan on the head. However, when he tries to complete the mutiny, Zoumas yells out a warning. Zoumas believes that they will all be freed by Kuroda, which Archer and Tucker know not to be the case, but try telling him that.
Archer convinces Kuroda not to shoot him because the docking port still needs to be repaired. Archer does that repair at gunpoint, and then they dock with Kuroda’s friends—
—except Enterprise found them, took over the criminals’ shuttle, and docked with it. A firefight ensues, and Reed and his security detail are able to get all the prisoners off the transport—which is still in a decaying orbit. Kuroda, however, refuses to leave, and fisticuffs ensue between him and Archer. In the end, Archer lets him stay on board and they all bugger off. The transport explodes in the Tamaal atmosphere.
“Tom” asks for a report, and Archer mouths off at him about their false arrest.
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Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Tucker uses tricks with igniting plasma in order to win a space battle against a foe who is superior on paper. Because he’s just that awesome.
The gazelle speech. Archer dives into the role of smuggler with both feet, and is convincing enough that Kuroda takes him into his confidence.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol does an excellent job of tracking Archer and Tucker down.
Florida Man. Florida Man Stuck Next To Chatty Cathy On Prison Ship.
I’ve got faith…
“Have you ever been to Burala Prime?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“If you ever go, avoid the polar islands! The people are friendly, but the cold is unbearable—nothing but ice and glaciers. I was stranded there for three months when some colleagues of mine decided to leave without me.”
“Imagine that.”
–Zoumas talking and Tucker losing his will to live.
Welcome aboard. Longtime character actor Mark Rolston plays his second of three Trek roles as Kuroda; he previously played the image of Pierce in TNG’s “Eye of the Beholder,” and will be back on Enterprise as a Klingon in “The Augments.” Sean Whelan plays Zoumas (though he’ll always be Tiny Tim in The Hebrew Hammer to me…), Michael McGrady plays the Nausicaan, and Holmes R. Osborne plays “Tom.”
Trivial matters: The original plan was to have Enterprise rescuing Archer from a prison transport at the end of “Judgment,” but the idea grew into its own storyline, which wound up airing two weeks before “Judgment” and not being related at all.
Zoumas at one point mentions tojal, a food that he says has to be eaten while hot, lest it congeal. Quark served tojal to the Cardassian scientists in DS9’s “Destiny.”
This episode was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup for a Series, but it lost to Primetime Glick. (An Enterprise episode was nominated in this category each of the four years the show was on the air, but it never won.)
It’s been a long road… “I’m a smuggler, remember?” One of the more mind-boggling decisions that was made by the production staff led by Rick Berman was the choice in 2001 to not use the prefix “Star Trek” as part of the title of this show, simply calling it Enterprise. It was a remarkably short-sighted decision, as all leaving the name of the most popular science fiction television franchise in the world off your title does is cost you viewers.
Then they do an episode like this, and you start to see why they left those two words off the title, because holy cow, this is the single most generic sci-fi action episode possible.
There are some moments in John Shiban’s script that work nicely. The fact that “Tom” is actually helpful is a nice touch, and Shiban also understands that different levels of criminal are treated differently by law-enforcement. As long as Kuroda is just a guy who stole a ship, he’s a nuisance. If he murders Enolian law-enforcement personnel, he becomes a murderer, and they’re going to expend significantly more effort to find him in that case. And Sean Whelan’s babbling prisoner is hilariously horrible, with Connor Trinneer doing a lovely job as his long-suffering straight man.
But this episode is so ploddingly paint-by-numbers with absolutely nothing to make it interesting. Trek has dipped into the crew-as-prisoners well before, most notably in DS9’s “Hard Time” and Voyager’s “The Chute,” both of which were light-years better than this slog. Mostly because we saw the effects of incarceration on people. Here, we don’t even make it to the titular prison, and it’s really just a hijacking-the-ship episode. And it’s a spectacularly boring example of the breed, with the added lack-of-bonus of a simply endless fist fight between Scott Bakula’s and Mark Rolston’s respective stunt doubles at what passes for the climax.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s next novel is Phoenix Precinct, the sixth novel in his fantasy/police procedure series, which will be officially launched at the PhilCon convention in mid-November in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a convention at which Keith will be the Principal Speaker. More on the book (including excerpts and preorder info) at this link.
“Kuroda’s dead, the other eleven prisoners are under guard. As you’re aware, my chief engineer and I were falsely arrested. We almost wound up on Canamar. Makes me wonder how many others don’t belong there. You wanted a report? You got one.”
I remember this one being held up as an example of Enterprise’s tendency to start episodes really badly. It doesn’t help that the opening sequence of a communicator floating inside a shuttle looks like a DVD menu screen. 40 seconds of that, “Faith of the Heart” and now time for a message from our sponsors.
But if anyone sat through the first commercial break to get to the episode proper…it’s actually not at all bad. We’re definitely back in generic sci-fi plot territory, but Archer does a good job of trying to keep on top of the situation and making sure no-one gets killed before Enterprise comes to their rescue. Kuroda manages to have more character than many one-off villains: In a way, he’s just another victim of the system, someone who never escaped the criminal lifestyle despite being innocent the first time he was imprisoned and allowed touches like refusing to eat prison rations because he feels he’s done that enough over the years, but his willingness to kill a dozen people just to cover his escape makes it hard to truly sympathise with him. In the end, while it probably wasn’t his plan, he might well prefer death to being saved by Archer.
In the end, we see what Enterprise can do and what they can’t. The Enolians are both brutal towards their prisoners (activating Tucker’s pain cuffs just for kicks) and not particularly bothered about little things like evidence (no-one even seems to know what the supposed contraband found on the shuttle was). There’s a feeling that they arrest people for fun and Archer and Tucker only get let off because this time they picked on too big a fish. The crew save the prisoners’ lives, but only to deliver them to a harsh penal colony that some of them might have done nothing to deserves. It’s hard to imagine Earth remaining on good terms with the Enolians after this: Even T’Pol walks away from their representative “Tom” (thanks, krad!) with disdain.
The talkative Koumas is pitched just right: Occasionally amusing but mostly just irritating. We get a couple of punch the air moments when first Reed and Mayweather charge in with the cavalry and then Archer casually electrifies the shackle Koruda tried to attack him with.
Reed suggests using the transporter to retrieve Archer and Tucker but the Enolian ship is too shielded. It’s not clear where Archer and Tucker got their clothes from: If they were on an official first contact mission, you’d expect them to be in uniform.
If this was meant to be the climax of “Judgement”, then I guess that explains why the end of that episode both sucks big time and makes no sense, but more on that another time…
cap-mjb: Oooh, good point about Archer and Tucker’s clothes. You’re right, they shoulda been in uniform….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@cap-mjb in 1, T’Pol’s walk away from ‘Tom’ was one of the best parts of the episode. I wonder how the Enolians became a trading hub with a legal system like that. Regarding the clothes, yes, unless somebody nicked them during in-processing and they got some rags in return. A prison ‘uniform’ right on the level of the prison food?
It also seems strange that the Enterprise would detach a shuttle with two officers (and none of them the communications officer …) for a first contact.
To refresh my memory for these rewatches, I’ve been searching through an old TrekBBS thread where I talked about the episodes, and largely copying and tweaking my comments there into these threads. But all I had to say about “Canamar” was that it was “simply pointless. A totally forgettable, insignificant episode.”
Well, I did have one more thing to say, in response to why season 2 features so many aliens we don’t see in the 23rd or 24th century, like the Enolians. My take is that NX-01 was really far from home at this point, so far that it was interacting with cultures that Federation expansion wouldn’t necessarily have caught up to even by the 24th century. After all, “The Expanse” indicated that the ship needed to travel for quite some time to make it home to Earth.
I thought I remembered this episode, but I was actually thinking of “Bounty.” I can’t believe they have two episodes in the latter half of the second season about Archer being carted off to alien prison.
I’d like to point out that Captain Archer explicitly notes that he & Commander Tucker took the chance to enjoy some R&R after their First Contact, so one rather assumes that they changed into mufti (possibly specifically purchased for the occasion or just brought along in the hope that they’d get the chance to use it) and were not given the chance to change back before being snapped up by The Guard.
It also bears pointing out that, given the rather rough-and-tumble nature of the ENTERPRISE era, the Enolian “tough on crime, tough on criminals, tough on everyone who doesn’t have a full-grown cruiser parked above us” approach to local security might be seen as more a feature than a bug by traders (especially considering that the Enolians seem perfectly willing to balance hard-nosed crackdowns with a little soft soap).
Anyway, I personally enjoyed this one a good deal – I’m happy to agree that this is cheerfully generic, but calling it purely paint by numbers does strike me as a little unfair (given the number of interesting small twists on the stock formula, some solid performances and at least one or two other grace notes: I’m especially fond of the Nausicaan actually saying “Thank You”).
If nothing else, seeing Captain Archer do a surprisingly good job of passing himself off as a small-time crook trying to get out of some big-time trouble (and doing an impressive job of making a completely unfamiliar starship work for him in the process) is a nice way of showing that it wasn’t just his family connections that got him the command of NX-01.
Generic is right, and not just for sci-fi. I’ve seen this plot plenty of times in other genres, and this time they didn’t do anything interesting with it. They just served it up for the umpteenth time. I’ve watched this whole series a few times, and the middle of Season Two really tries my patience.
So I was 11 years old when this episode aired, and being a lifelong trekkie at that point, Enterprise was my favorite show on TV and I was really into it. But I actually remember this episode for one stand out reason: its commercial. This was one of the first if not THE first that UPN marketed as an “Enterprise Event” which they were eager to advertise as some sort of cool reason for viewers to tune in. I still remember the way the voice over pronounced the name, CANAMAR. Problem is… It was a boring episode, and even kid me knew it. They did the same campaign with Judgment, calling it an Enterprise Event. This got 5th grade me thinking, so is every episode now an Event? Are they really that desperate to drum up interest in this show that they’ve resorted to this level of hyperbole for every single episode? It was clear to me that as much as I enjoyed Enterprise, the network had restored to begging people to watch this show. And that explains the entire run up to the season 2 finale, when they were throwing out episodes like Regeneration and finally retooled the entire show for season 3.
And Archer goes to jail again! This is my pick for Enterprise’s ongoing cliche. TOS had Kirk romancing a woman in what seemed like every other episode. TNG had Data Ex Machina. DS9 had The Annual O’Brien Torture Episode™. And Voyager had a shuttle crashing or blowing up all the time. Honorable mention to Kirk talking a computer to death, Troi stating the obvious and Sisko being a badass.
*Edit: I should have also added the holodeck malfunctioning on TNG to my honerable mentions.
I’m weirdly inclined to compare this to the opening for BLAKE’S SEVEN, except Blake’s Seven did the plot better.
Everything that’s been said about this episode is true. But I would like to add one nice thing. This is the first of two episodes late in season two to feature guest composer Brian Tyler. As such, the episode may be paint-by-numbers, but the score is phenomenal. Like, really phenomenal.
If there’s one thing I remember from this episode is that it started season 2’s weird trend of always having Archer be imprisoned by alien authorities. So the episode was supposed to be a part of the plot of the upcoming episode Judgement. I did not know that. Between these two and the late-season entry Bounty, it really creates an impression that the writers were running low on plot ideas.
Brannon Braga once used the term franchise fatigue. I don’t think Trek was necessarily in a period of fatigue. But I do think that particular storytelling approach was running out of steam. DS9 more than proved you could take the franchise into different waters while still being faithful to what came before. But Enterprise was still riding the same narrative approach that Michael Piller set in stone back in TNG‘s third season. At that point, Rick Berman had 16 years under his belt, Brannon Braga had almost 13, and even Bormanis had a decade of involvement. It was clearly getting increasingly hard to keep things fresh without a much needed shakeup.
The episode itself? Pretty forgettable, even with Kroeker behind the camera. I do remember it somewhat because of the “Tom” character, who was more interesting than the average stock Trek alien. But it still felt paint-by-numbers with no sense of urgency or stakes.
It should be noted that Shiban, like many network TV writers, has his share of hits and misses. But he was definitely one of the more uneven X-Files writers when it came to ‘Monster of the Week’ episodes compared to the other producers (the mythology arc troubles were usually a combination of Fox stretching the show past its prime and Chris Carter’s inability to stretch that arc). His Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul work was better, but that was due to just how well crafted that universe already was by design, thanks to the work of Vince Gilligan and company.
@9. Thierafhal: Don’t forget Doctor Phlox being a Mad Anatomist! (-;
Actually, Captain Archer winding up at the mercy of some alien jurisdiction actually makes a fair bit of sense when you consider how small United Earth seems on the Interstellar scene, the unsettled nature of regional politics at this time and just how much mischief the crew of NX-01 tends to wind up in.
Here’s an interesting question: which Starfleet Captain do we think has the longest ‘rap sheet’ justified or unjustified?
@13/ED: “Here’s an interesting question: which Starfleet Captain do we think has the longest ‘rap sheet’ justified or unjustified?”
Well, Michael Burnham’s the only one who’s been convicted and imprisoned under Federation law. But you asked about length instead, so I’d say probably Chakotay (who’s a captain by Prodigy), since he was a Maquis member for a fair amount of time and thus probably racked up a fair number of charges.
To be fair, “Bounty” is a continuation of “Judgement”, so it makes sense that Archer would be being pursued by alien law enforcement again.
Christopher said: Well, Michael Burnham’s the only one who’s been convicted and imprisoned under Federation law.
True, Michael Burnham is the only one who has been imprisoned, but I do recall that Kirk was busted from Admiral back to Captain in Star Trek IV after being convicted of disobeying orders
Captain Kirk and future captain Spock were court-martialed in consecutive episodes. Picard was court-martialed for losing the Stargazer, though that was more a routine inquisition than a criminal indictment. Captain Carol Freeman was court-martialed and exonerated in Lower Decks‘s season 3 premiere.
A number of captains have been arrested, tried, and sentenced under alien laws. Archer and Kirk were both convicted by Klingon tribunals and sentenced to Rura Penthe, and Kirk and Spock got imprisoned or sentenced to death under multiple planets’ legal systems (though I don’t think Judge Trelane really counts).
@16 – Which is exactly what he wanted. Some punishment. And everyone else got off scott free. Spock likewise when he forged orders, kidnapped Pike and stole the Enterprise. Not so much as a slap on the wrist.
Michael Burnham was also acting with a martyr complex and survivor guilt over Captain Georgiou’s death. The Federation sentenced her for starting the war and all the deaths that resulted when, in fact, she was completely uninvolved in that. She was instead guilty of assault and mutiny because she predicted they were about to be attacked. Which is certainly a crime and grounds for court martial but not worth a life sentence (if anything is in the rehabilitative Federation penal system).
Pretty boring and very pedestrian. I watched it once and don’t see myself ever sitting through it again.