1x21 Detained

[6.4/10] If you have a chance, you should read or listen to George Takei’s (aka Sulu from The Original Series) account of his family being forced to go to a Japanese internment camp during World War II. It is a harrowing, heartbreaking story of one of the worst instances of America abusing the rights of its own people based on where they or their ancestors were from, rather than who they were.

“Detained” is very much not that, though it badly wants to be. The episode tells the story of Archer and Mayweather being kept in an internment camp for Suliban immigrants. Their captors are another species called the Tandarans, who claim that its for the Suliban’s own protection, regardless of whether their prisoners are members of the Cabal or not, but treat their “guests” harshly and interrogate the Starfleet officers roughly as well.

The episode isn’t shy about what this is meant to be a metaphor for. In an episode that was already achingly didactic, Archer voices a direct parallel to America’s internment of Japanese citizens during WWII. And hey, thinly-veiled allegories for current events has been in Star Trek*s DNA since 1966. That makes it hard to fault *Enterprise too much for its outing. These sort of episodes have been a staple of the franchise for decades, the point was likely particularly salient in 2002 when a new wave of Islamophobia was on the rise after 9/11, and the show’s heart is in the right place.

But good lord, “Detained” just lays it on so thick. You’d have to be blind (or at least covered by prosthetics made of floam) to miss the analogy that Enterprise wants to draw here. Every conversation that Archer has with the warden, or his fellow inmates, hits the audience over the head with a 2x4 of messaging. The Suliban trapped here are innocent people treated with prejudice by an unjust system. The warden dresses up their imprisonment as a humanitarian necessity but views and treats them like scum. They’re treated differently because they look like people who’ve done bad things, not because they’ve done bad things themselves. All of this is delivered via extremely blunt exchanges that feel more like essays or political cartoons than actual dialogue.

But maybe it’s not the writers’ fault (or at least not entirely their fault). “Detained” convinced me that I should probably never go back and watch Quantum Leap, because Scott Bakula (Archer) and Dean Stockton (who played opposite Bakula on that show, plays the warden here, and would go on to play a memorable role in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica), are just awful together. The lines both are given aren’t great, but the pair do ham-to-ham combat here, with Archer giving downright Shatnerian line-deliveries about the Suliban’s rights, and Stockton turning into an angry racist caricature who turns red and yells and has all the subtlety of J. Jonah Jameson talking about Spider-Man.

I go back and forth on subtlety when doing this sort of episode. Supposedly, plenty of people didn’t get the similarly blaring allegory of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” from The Original Series, so maybe shows like Enterprise really do have to hold the audience’s hand to get their point across. And you can watch The West Wing’s “Isaac and Ishmael” if you want to see another contemporary show be even more direct and artlessly blunt in its take on post-9/11 America shortly after the tragedy. But it’s still hard to watch the warden rail about how releasing the Suliban would just lead to them joining the Cabal because they have nothing, or Archer superciliously declaring that it’s not about his rights, but about theirs, without just burying your face in your palm at how loud and over the top all of this material is.

There’s also some pernicious speechifying from Mayweather, who gives one of the Sulbian a “see, you prejudged us too!” monologue to get him to join their escape effort. There’s a laudable effort to show that a certain amount of bias is universal, but it comes off as clumsy, rather than worldly, when you’re showing that lesson being imparted to someone imprisoned because of the color (or maybe texture?) or their skin.

Oddly enough, if you can somehow separate all of that haymaker-style messaging, “Detained” is actually a throwback to an even more prevalent brand of episode from The Original Series: the prison break episode. If I had a nickel for everytime Kirk and one of his crewmates got locked up on some alien planet, I could afford to bribe the guards to let him out. “Detained” follows that tack, with Archer and Mayweather working with the imprisoned Suliban to make a break for it on the inside at the same time T’Pol, Trip, Reed, Hoshi, and Dr. Phlox are working on getting our heroes out of the clink from the outside.

The internal stuff isn’t great, because it just stumbles with more “you have to trust us” good guy nonsense. But the rest of the Enterprise crew’s efforts to free their captain are lots of fun. Trip and T’Pol having to balance the slow-moving wheels of diplomacy with their captain’s safety makes for some interesting choices. T’Pol agreeing to spring Archer rather than let the diplomatic process play out, and even pulling a fast one on the warden with a pseudo-warm welcome to dinner feels out of character, but too entertaining to complain too loudly about. And Phlox making Reed look like a Suliban so he can infiltrate the prison and help bust out the captain, while Trip blows up key strongholds of the facility from a shuttlepod, is damn good action.

It’s just a shame that it’s all in service of a thuddingly loud message and a dose of acting so hammy, it’s getting love letters from Kermit the Frog. It is nice, to say the least, that the Enterprise braintrust wanted to use their little pop cultural outpost to speak against prejudice people from other cultures in a time of war, particularly so soon after 9/11. But the show picked about the most ham-handed way to do that, which weakens the message, and its impact, despite those noble aims.