Star Trek Randomized Rewatch: Carbon Creek

ENT "Carbon Creek"

In one of the most memorable moments of "Carbon Creek", Mestral tells his two fellow Vulcan comrades stranded in late 1950s Pennsylvania that he doesn't want to miss I Love Lucy later that night. It's a good joke, but it doubles as a tribute to Lucille Ball, without whom Star Trek would not have been greenlit. When Star Trek was created, its writers did not foresee an episode like "Carbon Creek", a low-stakes tale of advanced Vulcans learning to smell the primitive American roses, with all the edginess of plankton. But that very inoffensiveness is arguably a selling point of the episode as well.

The events are framed as T'Pol telling a story, of her ancestor and two shipmates who crashed on Earth, to Archer and Trip over a dinner celebrating her one year anniversary on Enterprise. Jolene Blalock plays T'Pol and her ancestor T'Mir, the latter with real Beth Harmon energy. The Vulcan character most sympathetic to the humans is Mestral, played by J. Paul Boehmer (who also essayed a sympathetic Borg drone in, er, "Drone").

The small town Carbon Creek setting is established musically by Jay Chattaway. He uses rustic instrumentation, and perhaps anachronistically, a fretless bass most associated with 1990s crooning ballads. In a jarringly racy moment, T'Mir changes behind a cloth, and her silhouette goes even further than Jessica Rabbit in its cartoonish details. I'm surprised it was allowed on cable, but who am I kidding? UPN probably pushed for it.

At its heart, "Carbon Creek" is an immigrant story. The Vulcans are strangers in a strange land. In contrast with the other two surveyors, who are eventually extracted and return to Vulcan, Mestral stays because of his affinity for the people of Earth. Again, the stakes are low, but a hangout feel isn't a bad thing. Yes, there's a cave-in, and T'Mir invents velcro, but "Carbon Creek" is a light episode, light as a cloud. 5/10.

Stray observation:

- In the talk discussing the true first contact between humans and Vulcans, mention is made of the Zefram Cochrane statue in Bozeman, Montana. That statue was first mentioned by Geordi in Star Trek: First Contact.

Star Trek Randomized Rewatch: Demons

 

ENT "Demons"

(Not to be confused with the Voyager episode "Demon".)

"Demons" comes as Enterprise wraps up its metastory of the origin of the Federation, casting as its villains an organized Terran supremacist Make Earth Great Again asshole group. These Terra Prime domestic terrorists have in their charge a baby of pioneering significance, a half-human, half-Vulcan child.  Terra Prime's leader, John Frederick Paxton (Peter Weller), considers the child an abomination and rejects what it represents. As an audience, we know what it represents: the future of Star Trek. *Cough* Spock *cough*. The episode clearly has the advantage of depressingly timely villains, but significant storytelling blunders sabotage it.

Weller in some ways is playing a similar character to his villain Admiral Marcus from Star Trek Into Darkness. Both, totally convinced of their ironclad ideology, turn their xenophobia into terrible action. But while Marcus wants to reclaim a level of militarism that Starfleet lost, Paxton is a hardcore isolationist. Paxton's right-hand man literally says of their bigotry, "We're right", to which Paxton responds, "You're a wise man" - which doesn't speak much to nuance. (This right-hand man happens to be Black, which of course is an intentional touch, similar to Brock Peters as Admiral Cartwright expressing blunt racism against Klingons in Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country.)

The theme of the episode is legacy, with attention to who writes history, who will be remembered, and how. Paxton muses how history will remember him, which is appropriate since Weller has a PhD in Art History.

But the aforementioned baby (which is often referred to as simply "the Child" - Baby Yoda, much?) is the center of a major revelation: it is the child of T'Pol and Trip Tucker. Everyone in the episode proves to be incredibly dense in the face of this DNA evidence. There's all this hemming and hawing about whether T'Pol was ever secretly pregnant, which she denies, and who takes her at her word with that, and if so, how could this possibly be? This is science fiction! If these people can't figure out how this seemingly impossible child could exist in the 22nd Century, I don't know what to say. And the episode plays as if it's ahead of the audience on this too. It's not.

Worst of all is the disastrous romantic subplot for Travis Mayweather and a reporter named Gannet Brooks. "Demons" is the episode that finally confirms that Anthony Montgomery is a bad actor. The characters, who are supposed to be old flames who eventually rekindle their passion, have awful chemistry, all down to Montgomery, who gives his scene partner nothing in their scenes together. His answer for how to attempt familiar banter is not to attempt at all.

The editing is also off. As the episode has it, Travis' sex scene is interrupted by him putting Enterprise in touch with a contact who can smuggle Trip and T'Pol onto Terra Prime's mining colony. Travis, who already has an old friend character in the episode, is given another one off-screen. Why couldn't it be Hoshi's contact at the mining colony?

Stray observations:

- That's the Mayor from Buffy (Harry Groener) giving the fancy speeches.

- The Coridan ambassador looks like he has a face-hugger from Alien permanently affixed on him.

"Demons" has the right themes in place, and its villains are unfortunately timely, but the twin sins of not respecting the audience's intelligence with the baby twist, and Anthony Montgomery's terrible performance, take the wind out of its solar sails. 4/10.

Star Trek Randomized Rewatch: Borderland

ENT "Borderland"

In the opening sequence of "Borderland", two genetically engineered "Augments" take over a Klingon bird-of-prey and kill its crew. Unusually for Star Trek, in addition to shooting their way through, they open a can of martial arts whoop-arse on the Klingons. The Augments are super-strong, super-intelligent, and super-aggressive. Their dress sense is ragged chic, like a tribe of Peter Pan's Lost Boys (and Girls). And they answer to one man.

That is, Dr. Arik Soong, ancestor of Data creator Noonien Soong, again played by returning Trek royalty Brent Spiner. Spiner turns in a charismatic, sarcastic performance, animating this scientist who, unlike his roboticist descendants, specializes in genetic engineering. He gets a rise out of all the characters he interacts with, and even Phlox is uncommonly hostile toward him. One highlight of the episode is a particularly heated argument Soong has with Archer in the brig about the danger and potential of genetic engineering. As seen above, director David Livingston sets up some ostentatious shots foregrounding each actor's face in turn. It's like a Brian De Palma-esque split diopter, but without the actual mechanism separating the two elements of the shot.

Eventually, Soong's hormonal übermensch "children" get the run of Enterprise embarrassingly quickly. Spiner appears to be having fun, and so thankfully balances out what is the first bad guest performance I've identified in this rewatch: Joel West as Augment Raakin. His delivery is unconvincing and his screen presence sophomoric.

While all the Augment material is being set up to continue over the course of a trilogy, most of "Borderland" itself revolves around the misadventure of T'Pol and eight other Enterprise crew members, who are kidnapped by Orion slavers, fitted with a restraining chip, and sold at auction. It helps to keep "Borderland" feel episodic, which fits my purposes, but it's not the most pleasant material.

A good showcase for Brent Spiner and a decent start to the Augments three-parter. 6/10.

Star Trek Randomized Rewatch: Civilization

ENT "Civilization"

"Civilization" comes at a time when the Enterprise crew are still excited to find an undiscovered inhabited planet. Again, the things later Star Trek shows take for granted are unfolding for the first time in Enterprise. Archer and a landing party observe the pre-industrial civilization on the planet, but the situation is complicated by the fact that other aliens have already set up shop there, mining and consequently poisoning the local water.

So the premise of Enterprise crew walking amongst their first new alien civilization takes a left turn into fighting a shadow war against other more exploitative visitors (the Malurians), unknown to most of the indigenous people (the Akaali). I understand that stories need conflict, but making this the focus of the episode turns it from exploration to pulpy punch-the-reptilian adventure. Which is fine, but it makes the episode more generic.

The one Akaali who gets wrapped up in all this is an apothecary named Riann, who is framed as exceptionally intelligent given the context of her society's development. As such, she takes the news of multiple types of aliens interfering in her city in casual stride. That choice reflects her intellect, but it also leads events to seem ho-hum, or not so big a deal.

Stray observations:
- Enterprise represents a pre-Prime Directive Starfleet, though as T'Pol makes clear, the future Directive is based on a Vulcan policy.
- Unlike the Enterprise crew, who get a touch of makeup to look Akaali, the Malurians (Mal - bad, in the Latin) wear Mission: Impossible-esque masks.

A lightweight episode. Without the appealing Riann tagging along, it would be even more of a basic runaround. 5/10.

Star Trek Randomized Rewatch: Silent Enemy

ENT "Silent Enemy"

A sickly green-colored alien ship drops out of warp in Enterprise's face, stares it down for a few minutes without responding to hails, then warps away. As Travis puts it, "Maybe they checked us out, decided we weren't that interesting".

The setup is too easy; insert punchline here.

But while encounters with that mysterious craft dominate the main plot of the episode, the subplot also is textually about how uninteresting the regular character Malcolm Reed is.

In a memorably unusual setup for a B-plot, Captain Archer tasks Hoshi with figuring out Malcolm's favorite food. Since Malcolm's birthday is coming up in a couple days, there's a ticking clock. Archer contacts Malcolm's parents on Earth, Hoshi calls his sister and best friend, running into a wall every time. It's a lightweight subplot, amusingly generated basically by how boring Malcolm appears to be. That's one way to develop your characters.

The enigmatic aliens do keep coming back, eventually boarding the ship and skulking around like the aliens in Signs. Their ship tactically outmatches Enterprise, leading Trip and Malcolm to spearhead a project to install phase cannons on the ship. This is all pretty perfunctory stuff, but it succeeds in Enterprise Season 1's mandate to portray Starfleet's origin story. The ship can't even shoot phasers until this episode. Technology later Enterprises take for granted are coming together gradually for the first time. On that point, Archer and Trip have a conversation in the Kirkian "risk is our business" tradition, framing Enterprise as a true pioneer ship.

A functional episode, with a workmanlike A-plot and an entertainingly odd B-plot. 5/10.

Star Trek Randomized Rewatch: Horizon

ENT "Horizon"

The Randomized Rewatch spits out its first Enterprise episode! Not my favorite Trek series, and a rare Travis Mayweather-focused episode at that, exploring the backstory of one of Star Trek's blandest regular characters. So call me pleasantly surprised when I report that "Horizon" is a pretty lovely little episode.

The episode gets off to an underwhelming start. One of my pet peeves in TV is the lame duck teaser, or the teaser that gives the viewer nothing to work with, no special motivation to come back after the opening titles. "Horizon"'s teaser features Travis getting a call to come to the Bridge because Admiral Forrest just called. That's it.

Riveting stuff.

My theory is that at this point in Trek history, the mandate was to make the teasers as short as possible. But that's no excuse.

Anyways, this episode sees Travis reunite with his mother and brother, and reckon with the sad news of his father's death. The whole family are space freighters, in contrast to the infinitely more resourceful Starfleet. This actually brings up something like class issues, but that's not a main focus of the episode.

There's a touching scene where Captain Archer consoles Travis on his father's passing, and it's nicely and sensitively done, with a warm score from Mark McKenzie. Same goes for Trip's notably thoughtful gesture of giving Travis pictures Trip's taken of him over the past two seasons to show Travis' mom. See, I'm used to Enterprise characters behaving like incompetent reprobates, so this is all a nice change of pace.

Continuing with that theme, there's also a pretty delightful subplot where Trip programs a film festival of Frankenstein movies, consisting of the 1931 original, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. (I've seen all four of those movies.) T'Pol's bemused reaction followed by her insightful reading of Frankenstein's themes reflects well on her.

The main jeopardy of the episode comes from Travis' family's ship being attacked by space pirates, but there's also an Enterprise-bound subplot where they observe a planet that's been superheated by an unusual orbit and thus seeing widespread volcanic activity. This is little more than a footnote in the episode, so I won't get into the fascinating history of volcanic Prime Directive scenarios in Star Trek. I'll save that for if the Randomizer lands on the TNG episode "Pen Pals".

Speaking of TNG, which the Randomizer last sent me to, "Horizon" gets real cute talking forward to that show. Travis wonders aloud if future Starfleet ships will carry families onboard, and Malcolm jokes that if that's the case, they'll also need a psychiatrist aboard.

A warm-hearted outing that's part of the way to a hang-out episode. 7/10.