Weekend Trek “Chosen Realm”

So, this article should have gone out yesterday.  It didn’t.  I didn’t write it in time.  Will I sent out a second Enterprise article to stay on what passes for a schedule around here?  Eh, maybe.

The episode opens with some aliens near one of those spheres, and they spot the Enterprise and decide to recruit the humans for help.  “Recuit” probably isn’t the right word as it turns out “hold hostage and force” is the better way to put in.  Enterprise finds their ship later, floating disabled in space, and they do the thing they always do and bring the aliens onboard to give them medical attention and then have Trip fix their ship.  Only their leader, Pri’Nam D’Jamat, he has a plan.  See, he thinks the spheres were built by the gods or some such, that the waves they put off were divine messages, and since he is fighting the heretics back home, he will be using the Enterprise and its superior firepower to take out their enemies.

Now, Archer doesn’t want to do that, but see, D’Jamat has a plan.  His people have this biological agent in their systems that turn them into living bombs, and these are religious fanatics, so they have no problem blowing themselves up.  They even prove it!  One blows himself up, takes out a chunk of hull and one member of the crew.  There are two posted by the warp core.  They soon start herding people into their quarters, allowing only Trip (to run Engineering), Phlox (to run Sickbay, though they tried to lock him up too), and Travis and T’Pol (to run the bridge).  Archer, well, he has other issues.

So, let’s consider the strengths to this episode before I get to the weaknesses.  D’Jamat says that, because Archer and his crew actually landed on one of their sacred spheres, then they would normally all have to die, but because Archer saved their lives, then only one has to die, and Archer can pick the person.  He chooses himself and a means of execution:  the transporter, which he says is used to dispose of garbage.  Instead, what he really does is beam himself to another part of the ship, eventually recruit a disgruntled member of D’Jamat’s crew and that man’s wife (who wanted an abortion at one point!), and run around kicking ass.  Phlox develops an aerosol antidote to the bio-bombs, and T’Pol eventually stops taking orders, though only after D’Jamat used the ship’s weapons to blow up some of these heretics he spoke of.  Archer’s reclaiming of the ship, starting with letting Malcolm out of his own room, let to some exciting fight scenes.

Heck, I was even a bit amused when I learned the heresy said the spheres were created in ten days instead of nine as D’Jamat believes.

So, good episode?  Well, mostly, but there were some downsides, and they were big ones.  Let’s start with the crewman who died, a woman who, seeing one of D’Jamat’s people stab himself in the arm and start shouting in what looked like agony just stands there and watches.  Her face looks mildly curious at best, but she doesn’t see the need to get the guy help or maybe to back the hell up and away from him.  She just stands there until he blows up and takes her with him.  That was just silly.

But then there’s the final shot as Archer, having retaken control the of the ship, takes D’Jamat to the surface of his homeworld were it is revealed the whole planet is blown to bits because of this war of the proper interpretation of their screwy religion.  They aren’t extinct as a people:  the episode doesn’t say if only the large cities were destroyed but there may be other, smaller population centers out there, but they do have space travel.  It’s supposed to hit hard.  I suppose it does.  It does look like Archer and D’Jamat are walking in front of a green screen, but there’s just one problem:  Star Trek has done this before, way back in the original series.  In that episode, that basically ends the same way, the alien race considers themselves morally superior depending on which half of their faces is black and which is white.  Here, it’s the number of days to create some spheres.  But, it’s the same ending.

You know, if this era was going to remake an episode, maybe don’t make it such a well-known one.