Weekend Trek “Terra Prime”

A trivia note: actors Gary Graham and Eric Pierpoint, once upon a time, played the lead characters on the Fox sci-fi show Alien Nation, where Graham played a human cop and Pierpoint an alien immigrant one.  I’ve never seen the show.  But they both have reoccurring roles on Enterprise, with Graham playing the alien (Vulcan Ambassador Soval) and Pierpoint a human (Malcolm’s Section 31 superior Harris) this time around.  Both actors appear in this episode, but not in the same scene.

Part 2 shows Archer ingenuity, lets us know Travis isn’t completely stupid in his choice of love interests as Gannet turns out to be a spy for Starfleet Intelligence and not Terra Prime.  The Terra Prime spy is someone else, revealed to be an ensign I’ve never seen before who claims he didn’t want to hurt anybody and then shoots himself in the head.  So much for that guy.

As it is, the episode focuses more on the baby Vulcan/human hybrid than the first part, and I think it is to the episode’s detriment.  The child is a clone, produced using genetic samples stolen from Enterprise by the previously unseen ensign, and she’s already sick by the halfway point, dying in a manner that clearly saddens Trip and T’Pol, but did very little for me because the baby just appeared and just died.  There’s an actual baby on set with Vulcan ears on, and it’s a cute baby, but even when T’Pol names the child Elizabeth after Trip’s late sister and Trip tearfully tells T’Pol that, according to Phlox, a minor medical tweaking done during the cloning process would have produced a stable child whose DNA wouldn’t kill it, I wasn’t much moved.

That comes more with how the child is treated as a character.  She’s a sick baby, but seems to exist more as a means to let the character espouse their political and philosophical beliefs.  Paxton, still oozing creepy menace thanks to guest star Peter Weller, refuses to call the baby anything more than an “it” and even argues T’Pol should be just as outraged that the child exists as he is because both humans and Vulcans will be wiped out by the existence of hybrids.  Paxton’s sidekick is mostly mad the Vulcans didn’t intervene during the Earth civil war when they easily could have, or so he assumes.  And yeah, Archer needs to stop Paxton from vaporizing Starfleet headquarters.

It works out because, well, of course it does.  Trip does some internal sabotage.  Travis flies a sabotaged shuttlepod behind a comet to sneak up on Paxton’s base.  Malcolm, Phlox, and Archer make up the rest of the team because, if you need to sneak around a humans-only club, bringing one of the two aliens from the ship along is always a good idea.  Aside from the baby’s death, where the child is a creation of a plot convenience, the good guys win.

I think I see one of the reasons why the finale, which I will get to next week, is so hated based just on what I know about the plot.

So, maybe I should treat this episode as the real finale for one reason: Archer’s speech to the assembled ambassadors for the proto-Federation Earth is setting up.  It hits all the earnestness that good Trek loves.  It’s hopeful, idealistic, and it says exactly what the franchise at this point was trying to be.  Yeah, if the show ended on Archer’s speech–and not where the episode ends where Travis offers to fly Gannet back to Earth in a shuttlepod so they can spend a little time together when she has to work to regain his trust, not a bad moment but not a good one to end a season or series on–then I think a lot of folks might have been happier.

Man, I gotta go to the finale next?

Let me end here with something a co-worker shared with me:  the fact that Paxton is a miner is actually historically relevant as mining companies are actually more likely to go fascist to keep more left-leaning ideas out of sight.  You know, pesky things like labor rights.  Why?  You can move a lot of businesses to a less union-friendly location, but you can’t move a mine.

Anyway, I’ll be finishing up a whole era of Star Trek next time, then on to the Kelvin era.