“The Expanse”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 2, Episode 26
Production episode 052
Original air date: May 21, 2003
Date: April 24, 2153
Captain’s star log. A probe appears in orbit of Earth and fires a beam weapon that cuts a brutal swath through Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba, and the Caribbean Sea to Venezuela before burning out and falling through the atmosphere. The pod is recovered by a Vulcan transport. The pilot, an unidentified alien, was killed on impact. The casualty numbers are catastrophic, in the millions.
On Kronos, the Chancellor of the Klingon Empire is angry that Archer has escaped their clutches twice. He assigns Duras a ship and a chance to regain his lost honor by killing Archer.
Enterprise is informed of the attack on Earth and is immediately recalled. Tucker is devastated, as his sister lives in Florida. It takes several weeks to get home, and en route they’re surrounded by a bunch of Suliban ships. Silik kidnaps Archer and brings him before Future Guy, who informs Archer that the attack on Earth was committed by the Xindi. They were informed by one of the factions in the Temporal Cold War that humans would destroy their world in four hundred years’ time. The probe was a test, and now they’re developing a weapon to destroy Earth. Future Guy provides coordinates for the Xindi homeworld, and also a method of proving what he says.
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The Suliban return Archer and bugger off. T’Pol is skeptical, and wonders why Future Guy didn’t provide this info before millions of people died. Archer says he didn’t think they’d believe him before the attack happened.
As soon as Enterprise arrives in the Sol system, Duras shows up in a Bird-of-Prey and starts firing. However, several other Starfleet ships come to Archer’s defense and drives Duras off.
Enterprise comes into orbit of Earth, and they see the line of death that starts on the Florida peninsula. Nobody has heard from Elizabeth Tucker, so the engineer is pretty sure his sister is dead.
Archer meets with Forrest and Soval, who greet the intel provided by Future Guy with extreme skepticism. Archer provides proof: some of the pieces of the wreckage they retrieved from the probe is quantum-dated to minus-420 years, which means it’s from the future.
Soval, however, still advises against Enterprise investigating the provided coordinates, because they’re smack in the middle of the Delphic Expanse, which he describes as containing “fierce and dangerous species, unexplained anomalies. In some regions, even the laws of physics don’t apply.” In other words, a whole bunch of springboards for science fiction TV show plots!
Later, a Vulcan doctor comes to Enterprise’s sickbay, ostensibly to check for pyretic radiation, which apparently was given off by the wreckage, but who keeps asking questions about Future Guy. However, Phlox finds the doctor’s records in the Vulcan medical database, and he’s a psychiatrist, not a radiation specialist. Phlox is livid at the medical ethics violation, and Archer is disgusted at the rather transparent attempt by Soval to prove that Archer’s crazy.
Starfleet Command decides to let Enterprise go to the Delphic Expanse to try to find the Xindi. The ship is being retrofitted with better hull plating, better weapons, including photon torpedoes, and also gaining a contingent of soldiers from General Casey of the Military Assault Command Organization. Archer tells Forrest that he expects most of his crew to stay on board for this new mission.
T’Pol and Phlox discuss their futures. Phlox is remaining assigned to Enterprise, while T’Pol has been specifically ordered by the Vulcan High Command to not go to the Delphic Expanse. T’Pol later argues with Soval about her reassignment, saying a Vulcan should be on board Enterprise for this mission, but Soval makes it clear that the decision is final.
Soval also shows Forrest and Archer footage from the internal sensors of a Vulcan ship that entered the Expanse, Vaankara. The crew went completely batshit, killing each other with their bare hands.
Archer is undeterred, and he gets permission from Soval to pass by Vulcan on the way to the Expanse to drop T’Pol off. Enterprise sets off for the Expanse, with Duras (who has apparently been just sitting outside the solar system for the months it took to refit Enterprise) following them.
Duras attacks, interrupting a very ugly conversation over booze between Archer and Tucker where they make it clear that they’ll do “whatever it takes” to stop the Xindi. They don’t actually belch or grunt after saying so, nor do they chest thump, but they’re all implied.
Enterprise holds up much better the second time against Duras, and Reed disables the Klingon ship’s engines long enough for Enterprise to bugger off.
T’Pol decides to resign her commission and remain with Enterprise, to Archer’s relief. They don’t divert to Vulcan, instead heading straight for the Expanse. Seven weeks later, they arrive, at which point Duras finally is able to catch up and attack a third time. This time, it ends badly for the Klingon. Duras puts all his shields fore, so Archer has Mayweather do a loop-de-loop around to the back, where his aft shields are nonexistent, and blow him up.
They then head into the Expanse.
To be continued…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The notion of quantum dating, which enables you to determine that something is from the future, is patently absurd and isn’t even given a decent hand-wavey explanation.
The gazelle speech. Archer is passionate in his desire to go to the Delphic Expanse, even believing Silik’s boss…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol makes it clear in a delightful exchange between her and Archer that she’s happy on Enterprise and doesn’t want to go. Archer keeps mentioning all the things she’s complained about in the past, and T’Pol deflects or downplays every single one of them. It’s rather sweet, actually.
Florida Man. Florida Man Loses Sister In Alien Invasion.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox explodes in a rare burst of livid anger when he realizes that Fer’at came to his sickbay under false pretenses.
Ambassador Pointy. Soval sends a shrink to covertly examine Archer under the guise of scanning him for radiation poisoning that likely doesn’t really exist. On the one hand, this is a disturbing violation of medical ethics. On the other hand, given the examples he provides of the few people who’ve returned from the Expanse, from Vulcans who went binky bonkers to Klingons whose bodies were twisted inside out while still alive, you can see why he thinks Archer’s nuts for wanting to go there…
Good boy, Porthos! While Porthos is not seen, Tucker does ask after him, so he’s still on board. The first pooch in the Delphic Expanse!
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… T’Pol and especially Soval continue to insist that time travel is impossible because the Vulcan Science Directorate has determined it, which has officially crossed over into the realm of the absurd, given what Enterprise has experienced.
Qapla’! Duras is given one last chance to reclaim his honor by finally nailing Archer to the proverbial wall. It doesn’t work. Sucks to be him, but at least we know his descendants will continue to be pains in the ass…
More on this later. Enterprise is outfitted with shiny new photon torpedoes, which has already been established as being standard issue on Starfleet ships in the next two centuries.
I’ve got faith…
“It’s not my place to disobey the High Command.”
“Nonsense—you’ve done it before.”
–T’Pol trying to justify her acquiescing to being recalled and Phlox calling her on her bullshit.
Welcome aboard. Several recurring regulars are here. Two make their final appearance: James Horan as Future Guy (though the character will still be referenced as influencing things behind the scenes) and Daniel Riordan as Duras. We also have John Fleck as Silik (who will next appear at the top of season four in the “Storm Front” two-parter), Vaughn Armstrong as Forrest (who will next appear in season four’s “Home”), and Gary Graham as Soval (who will next appear in “Twilight”).
Bruce Wright plays Fer’at (he last appeared as a Bajoran politican in DS9’s “Crossfire”), Dan Desmond plays the Klingon chancellor, Josh Cruze plays Captain Ramirez, and various Klingons are played by Gary Bullock, David Figlioli, and L. Sidney.
Trivial matters: This episode sets up the Xindi arc that will occupy the entirety of the third season, while also continuing the Temporal Cold War storyline, and pretty much finishing the Klingons-going-after-Archer storyline that started in “Judgment.”
The episode as scripted was ten minutes too long, and so several scenes were cut, including a subplot involving a romantic interest of Archer’s and scenes with Sato discussing her decision to accompany Enterprise’s mission to the Delphic Expanse with Archer.
Forrest and Archer see the under-construction NX-02, Columbia. Forrest says the ship is scheduled to launch in fourteen months, which it will do in “Affliction” in season four, though it will be seen still in drydock in “Home.”
It’s possible that the Klingon chancellor is the same character that we saw in “Broken Bow.” While it’s a different actor, the cranial ridges and facial hair are pretty much the same. Neither chancellor is given a name. In the fourth season’s “The Augments,” the Klingon chancellor is identified by name as M’Rek, and it’s possible that this guy (and the one in the pilot) is M’Rek. Or maybe they’re three different people…
While this is Ramirez’s only appearance onscreen, he’ll be mentioned in the alternate future seen in “Twilight,” and also appear in the Romulan War novel duology by Michael A. Martin.
It’s been a long road… “Let’s see what’s in there.” Watching this episode was incredibly painful, as it was a reminder of just how unbearably stupid we as a country were in the first few years of the millennium.
I live in New York City, and I still remember the events of the 11th of September 2001 with awful clarity: sitting on the couch in my living room, Channel 5 on the TV, observing the events unfold, hoping that my then-girlfriend would make it home from her midtown office to our apartment in the Bronx.
But I also remember the subsequent weeks, months, years, as we embraced the most imbecilic macho idiocy, as air travel became a ridiculous circus that did precisely nothing to make anyone safer, as draconian laws were passed that served to curtail personal liberties to no good end, and as this country stupidly embraced torture as a (wholly ineffective) interrogation tool to be used against terrorists, a tactic that provided very little by way of useful intelligence. I remember the mindless patriotism, the fetishizing of the American flag, and how, in the 2002, 2003, and 2004 elections, any candidate who didn’t wave the flag and declare themselves to be patriotic and tough on terror had a hard time winning votes.
And I remember how so much of the pop culture of the time embraced this idiocy.
Even if I didn’t remember it, though, watching “The Expanse” brought it all back.
The analogy to the 9/11 attacks is not subtle here by any means. It’s decently done; the number of assumed casualties rising with each report, e.g., not to mention the very brutal visual of Reed and Tucker visiting one of the destruction sites, which looked a lot like what the area around the World Trade Center looked like in the waning months of 2001.
Then we have the cringe-inducing conversation between Archer and Tucker, which is vintage 2003: “Tell me we won’t be tiptoeing around,” Tucker says. “None of that noninterference crap T’Pol’s always shoving down our throats.” Archer’s reply: “We’ll do what we have to do, Trip—whatever it takes.”
That’s right, we’re gonna show those bastards that they can’t knock down our buildings! Sigh.
This season finale is much more like what DS9 did—closing out the season and setting up the next one. The former is taken care of with the wholly unconvincing stalking of Archer by Duras, who apparently sits on his ass for months on end outside the solar system. This is pretty much only there to provide the Necessary Action Quotient, since the entire rest of the episode is talking heads, aside from the teaser. (And hey, points for having a good teaser for a change, as the probe just showing up and blowing a hole in Central America is a very effective opening..)
Unfortunately, it’s not particularly well executed. Besides the awkwardly fitting Duras bits, there’s also the even-more-awkward shoehorning of the Temporal Cold War into this, by having Future Guy just give Archer the answer without any rhyme or reason. He says it’s to keep from polluting the timeline, but Future Guy has been trying to pollute the timelines since we met him in “Broken Bow.” WTF? The TCW has been a mess from jump, and now it’s reduced to a cheap writer’s trick to put the crew on the path they need to go on to make their season-long arc work.
Plus the initial attack doesn’t make anything like sense. Is this just the prelude to an invasion? If so, why is there nothing heard from the attackers for the months it takes to retrofit Enterprise and travel to the Expanse? We won’t even get into the complete absurdity of quantum dating things with negative numbers…
This episode sets everything in motion for the season three arc, at least, but it’s clumsy, awkward, nonsensical, and, worst of all, an embarrassing relic of an unfortunate time.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido looks forward to lots more rewatching and reviewing on this here site in 2023.
“The Expanse” is interesting as the end of an era, the moment when the show abruptly chucked out its entire format to date and undertook a wholesale reinvention of itself. Although it’s regrettable as an admission that the show just wasn’t working anymore, that the season had floundered so badly that there was nothing left but to try something drastic. I wonder how things might’ve been different if season 2 had managed to build on the strengths of season 1 and carry them further, instead of losing direction and meandering for the bulk of the year.
It’s also interesting simply due to how long it takes. Between the long journey home, the time spent preparing for the mission, and the long journey to the Expanse, I estimate this episode spans nearly four months.
The biggest conceptual problem, though, is the thing that sets the whole arc in motion. Why the hell would the Xindi give Earth a year of advance warning by sending the prototype weapon there? If the goal was to test it, why not test it on some uninhabited planet in the Expanse, so that Earth would be totally unprepared for the full-on attack later on? It’s just dumb plotting to have them tap humanity on the shoulder and say “Hey, here’s a preview of the devastating surprise attack we’re going to launch on you next year.” It’s bad writing when the villains arbitrarily make things easy for the heroes.
And yes, “quantum dating” is dumb as hell. Materials dating can tell you how old something is, but that’s entirely relative. If a 100-year-old object is sent back in time 500 years, then even the most accurate dating will show that it’s 100 years old, not -400 years old. I tried to come up with a handwavey explanation for quantum dating in one of my books (I think it was Myriad Universes: Places of Exile), but it was difficult to come up with anything even vaguely plausible.
“He says it’s to keep from polluting the timeline, but Future Guy has been trying to pollute the timelines since we met him…”
That’s not hard to explain. Future Guy is just one of multiple competing factions in the TCW, each trying to change the past in their own ways. The Xindi’s goals (and those of their backers whom we’ll meet later) would result in a different change to the past than the one FG wants. Besides, we’ve seen FG and Silik protect NX-01 before, in “Cold Front.” Whatever their plans are for the timeline, their goals are targeted and don’t include just any random change to history. There are things they want to preserve as well as things they want to change.
I hated the addition of the MACOs they added nothing to the show and didn’t do anything Reed’s security people could have done
While the kickoff of the new arc was clumsy, and the 9/11 analogy heavy handed, it gave the show a real shot of energy and direction that made the next season a strong one.
BTW, I also have a piece on the last seven episodes of Prodigy‘s first season, which will go up some time this week….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I never understood why the Xindi performed their prototype test on Earth itself. All that did was tip Earth off to their existence and give them a chance to respond. Would it be far better to do their test runs on some nameless asteroid close to home and then send the final weapon to Earth without warning?
Here are my possible hand waves for testing the prototype on Earth:
1. They had to prove that they could move the weapon out of the Expanse and have it still function. The Xindi probably did not expect final construction and movement of the ultimate weapon to take another year, either.
2. It could have been ordered/influenced by a TCW faction who does not want the Xindi to succeed in its final attack.
3. It could be done to hurt morale on Earth and divert some of Starfleet’s attention to recovery and relief efforts.
I don’t think any of those are great, but it’s what I’ve got.
@6/Brandon H: Reason 1 doesn’t work, since there are countless lifeless worlds outside the Expanse that they could’ve tested the weapon on. As for reason 2, if there were TCW operatives working against the Xindi, I’d think we would’ve seen them in season 3. I mean, Future Guy clearly didn’t want the Xindi to succeed, but he feared engaging with them directly, instead tasking Archer to handle it. And Daniels had only a peripheral involvement in the season.
Reason 3 is plausible, though. I remember my father expressing bewilderment at how people tend to think “If my country is attacked, we will rally and fight back all the harder, but if we attack our enemies, they will cower in fear and surrender.” People tend to dehumanize their enemies, assuming they’re lesser or weaker or more cowardly, and that gives them a blind spot about realizing that their enemies will fight to protect what they love just as hard as they would. So the Xindi may have had the same blind spot and thought the first attack would demoralize and paralyze humanity rather than galvanizing them. I mean, heck, that’s probably the same mistake bin Laden made when he authorized the 9/11 attacks.
As an aside: the rationale in striking fear into one’s enemies is the same rationale the female Founder used when she ordered Weyoun to let the escape pods from the Defiant return to the Federation after retaking Chin’toka.
Another possibility as to why the Xindi launched the probe when they did was due to Lorian’s Enterprise having found it and their failed attempt to destroy it. Because Lorian couldn’t make the sacrifice play, the Xindi launch the probe and use it as their test to ensure their weapon worked. However, at the time of this episode, we had no idea Lorian existed.
What surprises me a bit is that the Xindi’s backers had zero knowledge of Earth’s colonies (current or former). Imagine IF the test had been on Terra Nova. Starfleet most likely wouldn’t have noticed anything. Of course that would mean no reason to go into the expanse, so Enterprise, Starfleet and Earth would have been blissfully unaware when the real attack came in.
I was going to comment the same thing CLB did, that the dumbest thing about this setup is the Xindi testing their weapon on Earth. Given that they just barely managed to stop the eventual weapon after an entire season of trying, it’s hard to imagine how the Xindi might have failed if they had just run their test on some other world.
As for the 9/11 analogy, yes it is pretty much on the nose. Personally, I wish Star Trek’s response to that real life terrorist attack would have been to double down on their optimistic portrait of the future rather than to ape the war on terror. We all could have used some more optimism in those days, even if it’s not what many of us were in the mood for.
I never much liked this whole thing. One of the problems I had with Enterprise from the beginning was the TCW and the fact that what we’re seeing on the show is the result of interference from the future. This has the unfortunate implication that what we’re seeing is not the past of the other Trek series, but an alternate timeline (one of the major problems I had with the Kelvin Timeline movies). This episode doubles down on that. While heart-breaking and devastating, the attack on Earth was a direct result of meddlesome time travellers. You can’t kill millions on Earth without it having DRASTIC consequences on the future. One thing I’ve seen said about all this is that it’s more of a causality loop, and it IS the past of the other shows, because the future interference was always there in the past of those shows. However, that excuse also doesn’t sit well with me. Not that Trek’s timelines haven’t been a mess at other points anyway (to say nothing of Picard season 2), but the TCW always just bothered me. Though I find it fascinating that the new seasons of Discovery are running with this and outlawing time travel in the aftermath of the TCW.
Season 3, while it had some good episodes of television, if I recall, also just didn’t sit 100% well with me in that the site now went on this season long arc instead of keeping the same format. I tend not to do well when shows drastically change their basic premise.
@10/David Pirtle: “Personally, I wish Star Trek’s response to that real life terrorist attack would have been to double down on their optimistic portrait of the future rather than to ape the war on terror.”
To be fair, season 3 used the Xindi arc to critique and challenge the mentality of the “War on Terror,” not just to blindly endorse it. It showed Archer and Trip embracing that mentality out of anger, but over the season, they came to question it and eventually realized the Xindi were victims and needed to be reached out to. It’s basically a season-long version of the dynamic Gene Coon used in “Arena” and “The Devil in the Dark” where Kirk started out angry and vengeful toward what he saw as a monster, but gradually realized the “monster” had justifications for their actions and that it was better to make peace.
Optimistic storytelling doesn’t mean ignoring the darker urges and trends in society — it means engaging with them and challenging them, arguing that there’s a better, more positive way. Trek has always done that.
@11/crzydroid: It was always the intention of the producers that ENT would be the past of TOS, TNG, and the rest, not an alternate timeline. The Temporal Cold War element does sometimes seem to clash with that, but the producers never really wanted the TCW in the first place and had it pushed on them by highers-up who mistrusted the idea of a prequel and wanted an element that moved forward from the previous shows.
“Though I find it fascinating that the new seasons of Discovery are running with this and outlawing time travel in the aftermath of the TCW.”
I take it to be, rather, in the aftermath of the temporal hot war the Na’kuhl started in “Storm Front,” which was so extreme and chaotic that it convinced the TCW’s factions to end the cold war, so it stands to reason that it would also have been the impetus for the time travel ban. They did call it “the Temporal Wars,” and a cold war is distinct from a straight-up war.
I remember in the run up to this they were talking pretty heavily about the season long arc for 3. I was mostly over the show, but decided to watch the kickoff to the arc to see if it was worth continuing with it. Needless to say I did not come away impressed. It was the last episode of Enterprise I watched until the finale. My primary memory of the episode was Duras showing up again and again like some kind of bad timing gag. If was comical honestly.
“He may be telling the truth. If he is, I need your support, not your damned scepticism!”
My overall feeling is that this is good but not as good as it could be. It’s less of a story in itself and more about setting up a new direction for the show. It rushes to cut to the attack on Earth, just dropping it in as a 40 second pre-titles without any build-up, context or even reaction. And then the middle section drags, as the crew get ready for the mission and the Vulcans are dicks as usual. The Klingons, meanwhile, are only in it to provide the action sequences, since the show’s not ready to reveal the Xindi yet.
There is some decent character work, not all of it flattering. Archer loses his temper with T’Pol again, while Tucker is downright bloodthirsty at times, snarling at Reed’s attempts to offer condolence. (Their friendship gets a bit of a spotlight as they visit the devastated Florida together.) As CLB says though, while this and early episodes of the next season appear to be just mirroring real-life attitudes towards a terrorist attack, they’re actually setting up a deconstruction of that sort of “Hit them back” attitude.
And of course, T’Pol finally ends her one foot in, one foot out situation and commits to Enterprise after an inevitable chat with Phlox. The scene of Archer trying to put a positive spin on her leaving (after he and Tucker admit she’s grown on them) while T’Pol makes it increasingly clear it’s not what she wants is nicely pitched, as is the following scene with some subtle reactions to Archer indirectly announcing she’s staying.
Future Guy tells Archer that the Xindi learned humans will destroy their world in four hundred years: We’ll eventually learn that’s not true, so was Future Guy ignorant of that or trying to mislead Archer? I’m not sure it will ever be directly explained how the probe component got back from the future but presumably it’s down to the experiment going on with the spheres. Was the probe always intended to break apart and crash after the attack, or did it malfunction? Earth ships racing to Enterprise’s aid when they’re attacked by the Klingons just outside the solar system is the most sensible portrayal of Earth security in the franchise’s history, so naturally it won’t be repeated. (I’m tempted to ask where they were when the probe attacked, but to be fair it came out of…something right on top of Earth.) It’s not clear how Archer works out it’s Duras chasing him purely from a rather generic message about regaining honour. (Love the “We are so screwed” expressions on the other Klingons’ faces near the end.)
I believe Channel 4 cut all the shots of the video from the Vulcan ship and just showed the characters’ reactions. UK terrestial viewers would get very used to that sort of thing over the next two seasons. (For context, although the first season got an evening slot, the other three were shown Sunday afternoons as part of a magazine programme aimed at teenagers.)
(Okay, I might as well admit it now since I’ll probably bring it up at some point: I did a rewrite of this episode where Archer dies in the last battle, a mysterious shuttlecraft from the future helps defeat the Klingons and its pilot ask to come on board…Look, I’d been watching Robin of Sherwood, okay? I then rewrote selected season three episodes with myself as the new lead character…)
With the majority of the following season set in the Delphic Expanse, this is the last we see of a lot of the recurring cast for a while: Of the non-regulars in this episode, only Soval appears in Season 3, and even he only appears in an alternate future, not reappearing in the present day until the following season. Forrest and Silik won’t be seen again until Season 4, and not only does Duras make his last appearance, but so does Future Guy, his identity to forever remain a mystery.
There’s a return of the slow version of the closing theme previously heard in ‘Broken Bow’ when Enterprise relaunches. T’Pol mentions a Crewman Fuller, possibly the one destined to be Enterprise’s first fatality in two episodes’ time.
For me, this episode embodies what I think was the problem with Enterprise from the jump, namely that it’s supposed to be a prequel to the most optimistic science fiction franchise on American television, but it was made at a time when America, as a culture, wanted nothing more than to get Revenge on the Bad Guys. And so, we take a year-long sabbatical from the actual “prequel” bits of this prequel to focus on a hamfisted War on Terror analogue against a species that had never even been referenced in prior canon. Even worse, it’s the only the first of (by my count) 4 separate hamfisted 9/11 or War on Terror analogues to dominate the output of canonical Star Trek during the first two decades of the 21st century, none of which had anything particularly insightful to say about imperialism, blowback or militarization.
The Xindi arc ultimately has its moments, but I still really can’t disentangle it from the politics of the early 2000s, and so I will never think highly of it.
With regard to the Xindi giving the Earth a “tap on the shoulder” before the main attack, I agree that it was a stupid move, but it also sounds exactly like the kind of policy decision that gets made by fractious committees, so I’m willing to let it go.
Spot-on as always, krad. This one brought back to my mind the idiotic chest-thumping machismo of post-9/11. I’d forgotten how unsubtle the analogies were in this episode.
I don’t remember what I thought of this episode in first-run, but I remember being disappointed we weren’t going to explore strange new worlds anymore. With the “War on Terror” going on, it was disappointing to have a similar situation on Trek (yes, there was the Dominion War on DS9 a few years earlier, but this felt more like a direct post-9/11 analogy). Thankfully, the Xindi arc will be more nuanced and complex.
Running the prototype weapon directly at Earth could also have been a way to test if Earth had any orbital defenses and how effective they would be at stopping said weapon.
Also, for all Roddenberry’s posturing that Starfleet wasn’t a military, even though they use all kinds of Naval tradition and ranks and each ship comes heavily armed etc., the inclusion of Starfleet Space Marines made a ton of sense to me, and was something I thought was way overdue. Maybe that’s because one of my top Babylon 5 episodes was “GROPOs.”
Like several things about Enterprise the Xindi arc has a good idea waiting to get out. Battlestar Galactica obviously dealt with a 9/11 (and Iraq) allegory in a much smarter way.
Regarding that “Pearl Harbor Moment” …
I’m re-watching ENT in sync with the reviews. A decade or so since I saw it last. But I do recall that the Xindi are not politically unified. (Thumbs up on that, by the way.) So what about the thought that Xindi domestic political considerations dictated the timing of the first strike, to the detriment of operational efficiency?
To be fair, it doesn’t seem out of character for a Klingon with a blood oath to lie in wait for months, even years, before an opportunity for vengeance presents itself. How many decades did Kor, Kang, and Koloth wait before tracking down the Albino? And patience is a necessary trait of a hunter.
@13- agree about Duras continuing to come after them like an anklebiting little dog. Although even before the weapons and defensive upgrades the Enterprise was able to repel The Klingons without much of an effort, it was still annoying that Archer allowed them multiple attempts, pretty irresponsible in my opinions since it was clear the Klingons were out for blood.
I get the 9/11 parallel but in one sense there was a difference. Bin Laden targeted three iconic symbols of Western might- financial, military, and political.As someone who lives in Florida I thought it was kind of silly that they aimed the first blast of the big laser cutter thingy at what is arguably the least populated area of the southeastern United States, cutting through rural Central Florida and then the Everglades. There’s literally almost nothing there, And if you know the topography you’d know that a couple of centuries probably isn’t going to change that by much. Trip”s sister was doubly unfortunate to be living in the middle of nowhere and still get targeted by the Xindi probe.
And krad I have to co-sign everything you said about the aftermath of 9/11 and what it did to our country. In the very immediate wake of the attacks we came together for a short time. But it wasn’t long before patriotism turned into a nasty form of nationalism, and so many people still don’t know the difference. That conversation between Tucker and Archer was hard to watch, but it wasn’t inaccurate, sadly.
Is it just me or do the actions of ‘Future Guy’ (I much prefer ”The Enigma” but it makes no sense to avoid using the commonly-agreed designation) and the ‘Xindi Attack’ not make a lot more sense if the former set the latter in motion? (Either as a False Flag operation or by feeding the Xindi nonsense until elements within their polity panicked themselves into action).
It’s also intriguing to observe that, while the actions of the Vulcan embassy are unethical and outright arrogant, they make perfect sense: if somebody tried to sell me on a flight into a region of space that sounds less like the Bermuda Triangle and more like an incursion of purest Lovecraft in the STAR TREK galaxy, based on little more than a technological hand-wave (a technique that is quite conspicuously never mentioned again, to boot) and the word of an individual who can only be described as profoundly shady even if one believe he actually exists, I’d be quite eager to find out whether the Captain in question was playing with a full deck too – especially given the continuing tendency of Captain Archer to either provoke, or find himself otherwise caught in the middle of, Diplomatic Incidents involving one or the other of Vulcan’s (dangerously aggressive) neighbouring empires.
All in all I actually rather liked this episode, even watched through Jade glasses (if nothing else an attack that leaves a scar visible from space on the surface of the Earth and millions dead is an even more justifiable spur to Extreme Reaction than the loss of two thousand plus): it strikes me as almost a ‘Second Pilot’ for the series going forward and sets up a Status Quo which makes it clear that the way from Starfleet to the Federation wasn’t always an easy one (in a way that ENTERPRISE had rather failed to before now).
It will be interesting to see whether Season 3 can make the most of that.
@11/12:
Yeah, as I’ve said throughout the rewatch, I like the concept of the TCW.
It’s actually not a bad idea. It makes sense that the decade leading up to the Earth-Romulan Wars and the founding of the UFP — and all that will follow over the coming centuries — would make the mid-22nd Century a hotbed for temporal/historical research and shenanigans.
It’s just, well, the execution sucked.
@15/jaimebabb: “And so, we take a year-long sabbatical from the actual “prequel” bits of this prequel to focus on a hamfisted War on Terror analogue against a species that had never even been referenced in prior canon.”
Although they justified that lack of reference by putting Xindi space really, really far away, a journey of months, so they would’ve been unlikely to interact much with the Federation afterward. Plus, we eventually learn that they’ve lost their homeworld, and season 3 ends with them ready to settle a new one — a process that could easily occupy all their attention for the next 200 years. (Although there have been some Xindi in 24th-century Starfleet in the novels.)
@23/fullyfunctional: Don’t forget that it wasn’t just Florida that was hit — the probe “cut a swath four thousand kilometers long from Florida to Venezuela.” The damage to Florida and Cuba was directly depicted in the episode’s teaser. Consulting with an atlas, any path intersecting those three countries would have to intersect Jamaica and Colombia as well, and be more curved than shown, though maybe the curvature of the Earth would account for that.
@24/ED: “based on little more than a technological hand-wave (a technique that is quite conspicuously never mentioned again, to boot)”
If you mean quantum dating, it’s referenced again twice in the Xindi arc in “Anomaly” and “Azati Prime,” and in season four in “Kir’Shara” and “In a Mirror, Darkly” (where it confirms that the Defiant comes from the future).
On the other hand, your description of Future Guy as “profoundly shady” is quite apt, given that he never appeared as more than a shadowy figure. Or a ghostly figure, to use another definition of “shade.”
I’d say The Expanse was more than just an attempt to course-correct Enterprise itself. It was also a wakeup call to Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and company that the same TNG-esque narrative approach that had been in play since roughly 1989 wasn’t viable anymore. This was a shakeup to the franchise as a whole, and in a lot of ways this sudden shift to a full serialized approach goes even further than DS9’s prior attempts. This is the beginning of ENT‘s literal Year of Hell, with actual consequences. It’s an evolution that will eventually lead to the heavily serialized Alex Kurtzman Paramount+ era.
It was inevitable that The Expanse would stumble a bit. It’s a very transitional episode – probably the most transitional finale Trek’s ever done (other than Discovery‘s season 2 finale). They had to throw away the book and relearn from scratch. By the time we get to The Xindi opener next season, we get a very aesthetically different show – one much closer in design to TOS than the first two seasons of ENT up to this point.
9/11 was definitely a problematic era (I have a serious problem with rampant patriotism to this day), and this is one thorny aspect that I feel Ron Moore’s BSG dealt with better at that same point (20 years ago already????). It’s unsettling to see Archer acting like a Bush-era hawk. You expect that out of Trip Tucker, but not the captain.
The Klingon side was clumsy, but they had to get that out of the way. It would be awkward to have to revisit that thread on season 4. And there’s stuff I enjoyed, namely Phlox’s outrage at Soval’s subterfuge. And Kroeker gives the whole episode a sense of urgency the show doesn’t usually employ. Years of Dominion War made him the perfect director to handle this.
Going through this, it occurs to me that they likely would’ve gotten a lot more mileage out of this if it had been a Romulan attack instead of a new species. I like a LOT of the societal lore around the Xindi, they’re a very cool civilization. But having Enterprise have to thwart a huge Romulan operation, and having the Romulans be responsible for such a massive attack contextualizes a lot of the feelings seen in “Balance of Terror” and there’s no need for time travel shenanigans. Having Enterprise’s mission to destroy the Romulan superweapon be successful, then becomes the impetus for the Earth-Romulus War. Heck they could’ve even had a future Romulan faction in the TCW be the Xindi’s benefactor, manipulating them so that the Romulans don’t have to do the dirty work.
I remember when this came out there was a LOT of complaint about how there’s no way an event this huge wouldn’t have been referenced in the chronologically later series. It is kind of a heavy lift. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say people don’t really talk that much about Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima and Nagasaki after World War III though. But you never know.
As a nineteen year old kid in the Navy when 9/11 happened, I can verify that there was a lot of testosterone fueled vengeful machismo flowing through our veins back then, more of that then blood. t was our generations Pearl Harbor and in a way our time to kick ass. That had all been pissed out by the time of the invasion of Iraq however.
As for Archer and Trip’s conversation, I’m a bit more forgiving of it. Trip is in pure revenge mode because his sister just died, while Archer is slipping into Military Man with a Mission mode, thinking he’s about to be Patton for all of humanity. Next season does well by both of them though as these attitudes do get adjusted.
Still the Xindi Arc has a lot to recommend it, so we’ll see what happens.
I remember when this episode came out, I thought that it was ridiculous that no one in the TOS or TNG eras ever reference the attack. Two decades on, I have a better feel for how history just keeps piling upon itself, and how things that seemed terribly important at one time can seem like trivia after only a few years, let alone generations. In the case of the Xindi conflict, I imagine that it was overshadowed in the historical record by the much larger Earth-Romulan War that occurred shortly afterwards; especially given that the Romulans, unlike the Xindi, remained an ongoing threat.
@28/Eduardo: “[‘The Expanse’] was also a wakeup call to Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and company…”
How could it be a wakeup call to the people who wrote it? It wasn’t the cause of their awareness that the old approach wasn’t working, it was the result of that awareness. The wakeup call was season 2’s falling ratings. “The Expanse” and the Xindi arc were their response, their attempt to save the series by reinventing it.
@29/Mr. D: “it occurs to me that they likely would’ve gotten a lot more mileage out of this if it had been a Romulan attack instead of a new species.”
The problem with that is that “Balance of Terror” established that humans never knew what Romulans looked like, so direct interaction wouldn’t have been possible without breaking continuity, unless they went the hoary old “the whole thing is ultra-classified” route, which is really cliched and corny (though that unfortunately didn’t stop Discovery from using it in season 2).
Besides, Berman & co. never really got a handle on how to make the Romulans interesting.
@31/Christopher: That’s what I meant. Maybe I wasn’t clear the way I put it. For the first time since the 1960s, there was an actual threat of cancellation. It forced them out of their comfort zone.
@24/ED: “Is it just me or do the actions of ‘Future Guy’ (I much prefer ”The Enigma” but it makes no sense to avoid using the commonly-agreed designation) and the ‘Xindi Attack’ not make a lot more sense if the former set the latter in motion? (Either as a False Flag operation or by feeding the Xindi nonsense until elements within their polity panicked themselves into action).”
No, Future Guy had nothing to do with it. His motives are made pretty clear in the episode, in as much as anything about him is pretty clear: The Xindi are working for one of his rivals in the Temporal Cold War (like the Tholians who massacred the Suliban in ‘Future Tense’ were) and he’s using Enterprise to thwart their schemes. Given that removing Archer from his place in history in ‘Shockwave’ resulted in Future Guy seemingly losing contact with the Suliban (and possibly being erased from history altogether), it seems likely that the entire human race being removed from their place in history would be an even bigger move away from what he’s trying to achieve…whatever that is. Anyway, unlike with Future Guy, we actually meet the faction the Xindi are working for in Season 3 and learn what they’re trying to achieve and why.
“Maybe you should pay more attention to upgrading your weapons, so you can blow the hell out of those bastards when we find them.” -Charles Tucker
I was in elementary school when this episode came out. Enterprise was always “my Star Trek,” the one that I watched from the beginning, was old enough to remember everything and also be aware of the world happening around me. I would read the TV guide episode descriptions as soon as I could, so I was already aware of the premise that 7 million people would be killed in an attack. For me, after watching the series struggle to generate hype, it was apparent to me that the show was trying to shake things up and become more action oriented. As a kid who liked watching starships fight, I was ready to see it.
But my dad had a different reaction, and it still resonates in my memory. I feel like it was Trip’s line ^ about how badly he wanted to blow them away. That really isn’t a Star Trek sensibility. My dad was a vocal critic of the wars, hated 9/11’s affect on our culture. Right after the shot of Enterprise heading into the Expanse faded out, and the credits rolled, my dad said, I don’t think I like where this show is going. I don’t know if I want to watch this anymore.
It was the first time my dad hadn’t wanted to watch Star Trek with me. And that was the right reaction to have at the time. But it truly served to remind me that this show isn’t about anger, it’s about hope, and despite everything in our culture at the time telling us otherwise, we needed to resist acting on our rage.
Thankfully the show didn’t embrace that bloodthirsty mindset for very long, and I really like the Xindi arc. But this episode made my favorite show interesting again, even if it was a really crazy way to end a season. I think you gotta hand it to the producers and all involved to even be willing to take this direction with the show. I think it’s the only thing that makes Enterprise as a series relevant at all.
@33. cap-mjb: In my Defense, the only episode from Season 3 that I remember watching is ‘North Star’ (which I also recall rather enjoying: there’s always something inherently entertaining about ‘Cowboys IN SPACE!’ I find), so my suggestion was based purely on what I’ve seen on the show so far.
@34/Albatross: “I feel like it was Trip’s line ^ about how badly he wanted to blow them away. That really isn’t a Star Trek sensibility.”
Except it was often Captain Kirk’s initial impulse, until Spock or McCoy talked him down from it or the Organians stopped him from acting on it or whatever. Heck, when Spock wasn’t around in “A Private Little War,” McCoy wasn’t able to stop Kirk from going the militaristic route and addressing the problem with more firepower, although at least that wasn’t presented as an unambiguously good thing. The closest Kirk came to pacifism was “Yes, I’m a killer, but I won’t kill today.” Which didn’t rule out the option of killing on a different day.
The Star Trek sensibility doesn’t mean that every character is alike and shares the same unvarying beliefs. It means that people are capable of growing and learning from their mistakes, not that they never make mistakes. Sometimes they do want to blow the enemy away, but they generally come to realize it’s the wrong choice. That happened a lot in TOS, so it makes sense that it would happen in ENT, when humanity is a century less “perfected.” It’s just that people forget that because of the way TNG overly idealized its characters’ behavior. (Well, most of the time. I always hated that episode where the Enterprise blew up a Romulan ship with thousands of lives aboard and Geordi cheered and whooped as if his team had just scored a goal.)
As I stated earlier, that conversation between Tucker and Archer was hard to watch, especially as an allegory to what happened to our country post 9/11. But I would give Tucker a bit of a break because I sensed his anger and thirst for revenge wasn’t motivated by mindless “my Earth right or wrong” machismo, but by his profound grief at losing his little sister. I wouldn’t be much in the mood for understanding and bridge-building either, especially in the immediate aftermath….
“The problem with that is that “Balance of Terror” established that humans never knew what Romulans looked like, so direct interaction wouldn’t have been possible without breaking continuity, unless they went the hoary old “the whole thing is ultra-classified” route, which is really cliched and corny (though that unfortunately didn’t stop Discovery from using it in season 2).“
Well, I’m not advocating for a 1 to 1 conversion, having such a large scale attack be the opening of the Romulan War or the precipitating event. Romulans typically move via catspaws if possible as they don’t like risky direct confrontations. You could even still do the Xindi as the villain, but have the Romulans being the ones manipulating things instead of it being a faction of the Temporal Cold War.
My view of Tucker is that he’s wrong but his reaction’s understandable. It takes pretty much the whole of the next season, but he does eventually realise that killing the people that killed his sister won’t automatically make the galaxy a better place. I’m inclined to be more generous to Archer than krad and others. I see his “We’ll do whatever it takes” not as macho and vengeful but as vague and non-commital: He doesn’t want to explicitly shoot down Tucker’s eye-for-an-eye mentality (and he’s aware Tucker will take it as agreeing with him), but he’s hoping that there will be a solution other than killing a few million Xindi to even up the score.
@36/CLB: I realise I’m going to feel incredibly stupid when you tell me, but after wracking my brains and even checking which episodes they appeared in on Memory Alpha, I have to ask…in which episode of TNG does the Enterprise destroy a Romulan ship? The only time I can think of when a Romulan ship is destroyed when the Enterprise is around is in ‘Tin Man’ (and ‘Unification’, I guess, sort of) and it isn’t the Enterprise that does it.
Yes, the attitudes expressed by Tucker and Archer in their scene together talking about their response to the attack is disturbing, but I excuse it (despite this being “Star Trek”), because this is the prequel series where humans haven’t evolved yet to what we’ve seen of mankind in the earlier (chronologically later) series. So we have to take this journey with them to see how these particular people get to that more enlightened frame of mind (and sure enough the following season will bare this as true). Otherwise, I think this is a decent enough hour of intrigue and action and drama. It is definitely Enterprise 2.0 and a belated reaction to 9/11. I think it’s commendable that the powers that be decided to dramatically break format from what they were doing before on the series, although they basically had no choice with the dwindling ratings. This didn’t work, however, so I have to wonder if anything could have revived the franchise at this point, unless the whole Kelvin timeline film series was instead made into a TV show.
SFX nitpick – while the opening scenes of the Xindi probe attack on Earth was very well done (loved the way the mechanics of the probe itself was rendered), as with other prior (and future) depictions on this show, the CGI of rendering humans or humanoid figures is pretty bad. The scene of Tucker and Reed surveying the damage in Tucker’s sister’s hometown is the one in particular that pulls me out of the show because of the rendering of the figures looks like something out of a 1990’s Nintendo video game.
@39/cap-mjb: I don’t remember what episode it was, so it might not have been a Romulan ship. The identity of the ship is not the point. The fact that Geordi was shown cheering at the death of hundreds of people is the part that bothered me.
@39/cap-mjb: The Enterprise destroys a Romulan ship in the second season episode “Where Silence Has Lease.” However, that ship was an illusion conjured up by Nagilum, the super powerful antagonist of the story, so no Romulans were actually killed in the making of that episode. Still, Geordi did not know at the time of the incident that these Romulans were not real. But I always took his elation of their ship’s destruction as relief of his and his own comrades survival in that battle. After all, Romulan Warbirds were known to be comparable in firepower to Galaxy Class starships.
@42/garreth: Oh, thanks. I thought that might be it, but I wasn’t sure.
“But I always took his elation of their ship’s destruction as relief of his and his own comrades survival in that battle.”
Maybe, but the way it was presented still left a bad taste.
garreth is correct, the incident Christopher was thinking of was in “Where Silence Has Lease,” and I also agree with Christopher that it was in poor taste. That wasn’t a shout of relief, that was a “yeah!” of triumph, which was, to say the least, tacky.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@44/krad: Tom Paris expressed equally vocal elation at destroying an attacking Krenim ship in “Year of Hell, Part 1” on VOY. Is that not equally tacky?
For LaForge it was an out-of-character moment. For Paris… well…
@46/garreth: It’s tacky regardless of who does it. Federation-era humans are supposed to be beyond celebrating the deaths of enemies. They should see it as a tragic necessity, not a touchdown to cheer at.
While Christopher is correct in the abstract, we are taking about Tom Paris who is far from an ideal Federation-era human…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@49/krad: Sure, Tom’s a bit of a rogue, but even he isn’t the sort to cheer people’s death.
My reaction to this new story arc (and I read comment 29) was to be let down. As the attack happened and the arc in Season 3 proceeded I decided I didn’t really mind the idea completely, but it was done at the wrong time in the series. I would have preferred if Enterprise had continued on the course of laying out the pre-TOS history, notably the Romulan War and the events leading up to the founding of the Federation. The Xindi attack came off to me as a distraction. I would have liked this arc to have happened later on in the series and felt that having it occur when it did contributed to the demise of Enterprise as a series.
They ought to have given the tacky moment to Worf in that episode. We had already seen him in full Klingon savagery mode on the holodeck, plus there’s his notorious feelings about Romulans. LaForge was an odd choice.
@krad
Actually I disagree. I believe Tom gets a bad rap. At first he maintained a defensive exterior, but he’s a very caring and honorable person. Very loyal to his friends and even heroic and self-sacrificing.
Sounds pretty ideal to me.
I’ve always been a Tom fan. I like the rebels.
<Today is the 36789th day of my life I’m not a robot>
@49/Chris
I think you’re going too deep with it. I’ll rewatch that episode just so I can review the scene you’re talking about because now my curiosity is peaked, but I doubt they were cheering in celebration. Probably just relief at being out of danger.
We both know who Geordi is. He would do anything to help anyone and had no malice towards anyone, supposed enemy or not.
@@@@@ richF.
I never watched the show live. Interestingly, I only caught it as a much older viewer, age 38 in 2020. I was vaguely aware of it before then but had never gotten around and watching it. Overall I enjoyed the Xindi timeline and I thought they did it well, but I could see how someone might feel it came a little too soon.
I would have enjoyed the TCW much more except they never delved into it very much. It was just sort of vague off in the margins and I believe the show suffered from it’s lack of development. It seemed like it was going to be a major arc in the first one to two seasons as half the premiere was devoted to it, but then they quickly let it fall into the background only touching upon it once every so often briefly, but we never really got to know who these factions were, it was never fleshed out the way the Xindi timeline was hence, I never got to really fully appreciate the gravity of the TCW the way I could have. We never got to find out who the Shadow Man from the future was, or what initially sparked the TCW or any other background characterization that would have brought it more to life for the viewer. Too many shortcuts were taken, I.e Daniels says “you wouldn’t understand”, so the dialogue doesn’t even give a faux-sciency fake explanation. It just leaves it at that. All of S1 and S2 seemed to tease at more from the TCW but we never quite get there. I wonder if that was intentional or not.
When the entire plotline finally resolved after Storm Front I thought it was interesting but I didn’t feel as much emotional payoff as I would have if we had gotten to see more of the TCW thru the series. I was one who liked the concept, but it seems they left some pretty key parts out. I’m one that likes long serialized sweeping dramatic story arcs so I would have definitely appreciated more from the TCW.
It’s a shame they canceled it after four seasons. I think they had a lot of gas left in the tank personally. They teased a lot of storylines over S3 and S4 that I have a feeling they wanted to explore more deeply over the following three seasons that I’m presuming they thought they were going to get.
Should have been able to finish out with seven seasons like all the other Trek vehicles.
Clippy2000: how much storytelling gas they had in the tank is completely irrelevant. Television is a business, not a public service, and Enterprise was a very expensive show that did not have enough viewers to justify that expense by the time the fourth season rolled around.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Enterprise was lucky to get even a third season much less a fourth. I didn’t know it at the time but the state of the ratings after the second season was such that the series very well could have been cancelled. But I do remember during the third season that ratings continued to slide and there was imminent danger of cancellation. It took a significant reduction in budget and a reduction in episodes produced to get that fourth season made.
garreth: Indeed. Had Enterprise been on a more established network, it probably would’ve been cancelled even sooner, but while it was doing very poorly by the third season (and the Xindi arc did basically nothing to goose ratings as hoped), UPN wasn’t exactly bursting with more successful alternatives, which is probably what kept the show going as long as it did…
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@54/Clippy2000: “We both know who Geordi is. He would do anything to help anyone and had no malice towards anyone, supposed enemy or not.”
Yes, which is exactly why that moment was out of character for him. Geordi is a fictional construct that performs the way various writers and directors decide he should. So sometimes, one of those writers or directors can choose to portray him in a way that’s inconsistent with who he’s supposed to be. That was such a moment. I’m not saying Geordi isn’t compassionate, I’m saying the people who created that scene in “Where Silence Has Lease” got Geordi wrong.
@58/krad: Indeed, UPN ceased to exist only one and a third years after ENT went off the air. It relied on Star Trek as its anchor from the start, and never quite grew beyond that dependence.
@59/CLB: Star Trek was definitely the anchor for UPN from the start, particularly with Voyager, but the network eventually found relative success with programs like America’s Next Top Supermodel and WWE SmackDown such that keeping Enterprise around was no longer seen as essential for the network to carry on. But as you mentioned, a little over a year after Enterprise ended, UPN folded and merged with the WB to form the CW, which has lasted for a longer existence than the former upstart networks that it emerged from.
@chris
I’ll rewatch it. And see what I think. You might be right.
@Chris
Yeah I just watched that part. Interesting. Well, eh, I just took it as they were warned to break off and did not, they had initiated the attack and they were a major enemy of the federation at the time. In that moment it wasn’t wrong to shoot back with full force. I don’t think Geordi was happy the opposing ship died but that his people had prevailed.
I understand that it might seem briefly OOC but think it makes sense given the above criteria. Idk.
It’s a moot point anyhow bec it all turned out to be an illusion.
What it does highlight is how, imo excellently and eerily done and much more raw the first two seasons were. I have favored eps from all seven seasons but I remember being a kid watching it for the first time being SO creeped out during that episode. For such an initially low budget show with no special effects to speak of, they knew how to bring up the dramatic effect when they wanted. I thought overall that ep was very well done. It is a shame that they had to file the rough edges down starting S3 and forward. There’s a rawness and simplicity to the first two seasons that I for one really appreciate it and go back to watch time and time again. And as much as I liked Crusher as the doctor I thought it was a real shame they didn’t keep Diana Muldaur on for longer. She was a firecracker.
Legit question here, was the footage from the Vulcan ship meant to be a callback of sorts to the movie “Event Horizon,” or was that an accident? I haven’t seen anyone else mention that movie in conjunction with that scene, so maybe I’m imagining it?
If you haven’t seen the movie, there’s a bit where the characters discover footage of what happened to the missing crew of the titular ship, and it is more than a little similar to what happened to the Vulcans here, only more R rated.
(And maybe it was partly due to that connection in my head that the Expanse could never live up to the “hype,” as it were. I saw Event Horizon almost on accident when I was probably too young, because if I remember right, I spent part of the movie hiding behind the couch.)
Quoth Clippy2000: “For such an initially low budget show with no special effects to speak of,”
Um, no. TNG was by no stretch of the imagination a low-budget show, and its effects were state of the art for the late 1980s.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@64/Clippy: “I don’t think Geordi was happy the opposing ship died but that his people had prevailed.”
Prevailed through the death of others. That’s the point. A victory achieved by killing others is cause to feel relief at one’s survival, perhaps, but cheering about it like your team just scored a goal is simply crass.
“It’s a moot point anyhow bec it all turned out to be an illusion.”
Not at all, because Geordi thought it was real, and what’s at issue here is his state of mind.
“For such an initially low budget show with no special effects to speak of”
As Keith said, nothing could be further from the truth. TNG was one of the highest-budgeted shows of the 1980s-90s, typically spending $1.5 million per episode, which was maybe twice the typical budget for a prime time show of the day. Its visual effects were groundbreaking, beyond anything else on TV at the time. You want to see an actual low-budget show with crude FX, look at TNG’s syndication partner War of the Worlds: The Series, and you’ll see how much better TNG was.
@krad #66
You might be right compared to contemporaneous shows maybe it’s budget was higher than most. I thought I remembered reading somewhere recently that the network wanted to keep it on a relatively constrained budget. And at the time considering CGI was limited or non-existent in the ’80s yeah contemporaneously it was probably state-of-the-art with sfx. I guess I meant when compared to today’s or even late 90s when I made that statement. I thought they did great with their practical effects but obviously in 1987 CGI was in its infancy.
@68/Clippy: The biggest mistake people make today is equating all visual effects with CGI. TNG did not use CGI except in a few limited instances, like the Silicon Entity in “Datalore”/”Silicon Avatar” and the space creatures in “Galaxy’s Child” (though they were partially created with miniatures). TNG used a mix of traditional visual effects techniques such as miniatures and matte paintings with video animation and compositing techniques. The video effects were done at standard definition and thus had to be redone for the HD remastered release, though the original film elements such as miniatures and matte paintings survived and simply had to be recomposited (since film is natively HD).
The main way in which computers were used was in motion control shots, programming the camera to repeat the same movement over and over so that different FX elements and lighting passes could be combined in shots with a moving camera. TNG became quite adept at this; while its ship scenes in early seasons tended to have a stationary camera, by season 3 or so they started doing gracefully swooping camera moves around the ships, which became something of a trademark.
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To Chris
Thank you for your comment. I recognize that in the 70s, ’80s and ’90s practical effects dominated until CGI became cheaper and more advanced. I thought for television ST:TNGs practical effects were great. Especially viewing as a young child and now as an adult I still enjoy them, both out of nostalgia but simply because for their time and modality they were well done.
I was once chatting with a guy who was a Voyager fan and when I told him my favorite series was TNG he referred to it as having “poverty FX” which offended me lol. Sure, TNG, except in rare instances, never had the fancy, shiny CGI effects like Voyager crashing on an ice planet or the regular fleet battles on DS9. However, for its era, TNG still had state-of-the-art special effects and which in large part, still stand up fine today. And it started pioneering the use of CGI which led to its greater use on its spin-off series. Plus, TNG had a lot more going for it then just its FX to make it the classic and endearing show that it remains.
I am curious though to see the CGI FX tests for the Enterprise-D in “Encounter at Farpoint” which were deemed at the time to be too unrealistic for broadcast and use on the show.
@75/Clippy: Just to clarify, what you’re referring to are called visual effects (or photographic effects or optical effects), not practical effects. Practical effects are on-stage mechanical effects like sliding doors, consoles and displays, rain or fog, pyrotechnics, prosthetic makeup, animatronic or puppeteered creatures — anything that’s physically there on the set and interacting with the actors. Visual effects, whether created optically or by computer, are effects created in post-production and added onto the film after the fact. (Well, at least until the advent of virtual filming volumes like those used in The Mandalorian and Discovery, with the CGI backgrounds created before filming and projected behind the actors.)
@81/garreth: Mostly I agree with your comment, but the real pioneer in CGI effects was Babylon 5, or rather its VFX company Foundation Imaging, which went on to do CGI for Trek and numerous other shows. It was Foundation’s development of a system that could do a high volume of complex CGI FX shots at low cost that played a pivotal role in the boom of science fiction and fantasy shows in the ’90s and ’00s, because it made visually impressive SF/F more affordable than it had ever been before and thus allowed a greater number of genre shows to be made and to be cost-effective enough to avoid cancellation.
Quoth Clippy2000: “I thought I remembered reading somewhere recently that the network wanted to keep it on a relatively constrained budget.”
Nope. For one thing, there was no network. TNG was released in first run syndication. For another, the studio, Paramount, viewed Trek as an important part of their TV stable, and while the producers tried to save money where they could because producers always do that, they were not really constrained z as such, certainly not in comparison to other contemporary shows.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I have a lot of feelings on the Xindi arc.
1. I appreciate that ENT was never actually going to do a “ra ra ra America!” storyline. It was all about Archer actually wanting to make peace with the Xindi and succeeding. So much so that it actually comes off as dissatisfying because the Xindi commit horrific war crimes and plans for genocide with a lot of them just getting off scott free. The assumption that peace must preclude justice is an uncomfortable one. You might have to sacrifice one for the other but the idea that justice is not a concern at all is a disturbing one.
2. I appreciate that they actually were trying to do a rebuttal to the War on Terror and actually have some relevance. Of course, the irony is that the best Star Trek episodes relating to the War on Terror preclude it. Not just Deep Space Nine dealing with issues of terrorism, torture, ethnic and religious violence, and so on but also “Detained” where the handling of America’s internment camps for the Japanese actually were pretty good rebuttals for America’s own illegal site for suspected prisoners (who often turned out to be innocent–and even when guilty were denied due process).
3. Yes, they totally should have done the Romulans rather than the Xindi because the Xindi are, in my opinion, as exciting as watching paint dry. Somehow they managed to make a multi-species coalition predating the Federation of Quarian-esque Space Nomads into something incredibly boring. Why do people keep coming back to Romulans and Klingons? Because both of them are awesome. The Andorians too. Xindi? Ehhh. The only really interesting ones are the Reptilians and that’s because at least “jerk” is a personality.
@88/C.T. Phipps: “Why do people keep coming back to Romulans and Klingons? Because both of them are awesome.”
Not necessarily. The Berman-era shows never really managed to make the Romulans interesting. Tomalak was fun, but that was mainly due to Andreas Katsulas.