Playing a bit fast and loose with the door timings, aren't they? Up to now they've established that pushing the button to open an interior door on Enterprise will open it long enough for someone to walk through it. Now suddenly they have doors that wait until someone actually walks through. It's actually kind of interesting to think about what sort of sensors the doors on this Enterprise might have compared to the fully automatic doors on later starships—though the doors actually open and close when the director says, which means they're subject to dramatic timing and all the other little things that make it impossible to actually establish their technical workings.
Another pre warp culture episode. Too bad we don't see much of it.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-06-28T02:45:48Z
[6.5/10] Gene Roddenberry once described the Prime Directive (or General Order 1, if you prefer) as the “anthropologists code.” It stems from the same idea of not interfering with the thing you’re studying, so as to learn and understand without disrupting or altering. It’s not a flawless translation from anthropology to interstellar space diplomacy, but it’s the backbone of tons of Star Trek episodes, and a strong source for any number of moral and ethical dilemmas in the franchise.
And it’s a pretty good rule! I’ll admit, the pre-warp civilization barrier always seemed a little arbitrary to me (presumably there are civilizations prepared to communicate with other worlds even if they can’t travel to meet them yet), but it’s a sound idea. The combination of the butterfly effect, and basic humility suggests that it’s a good practice not to mess around with the natural development of civilizations lest even the mighty spacemen screw something up.
The prospect of messing with the trajectory of a civilization makes for a good reason to go back to a clandestinely visited planet to retrieve a lost communicator. It even probably warrants taking a tough beating by some military brutes while you wait for your comrades to rescue you. But does it warrant losing your life and the life of one of your best officers over? That’s where Enterprise loses me a little.
T’Pol (often the voice of reason on the show) certainly thinks it’s a noble and worthwhile thing to sacrifice your life for. That choice from Archer and Malcolm -- to go up to the brink of being hung without hope of the inevitable rescue -- is positioned as a sign of maturity for the humans, showing that though we’re new to the interstellar scene, we understand the gravity and responsibility of space travel, and aren’t just hopping from planet to planet and monkeying around.
The problem is, beyond the principle itself, that Enterprise doesn't built much of an episode around the admittedly compelling moral dilemma. Once again, the show seems to be taking its cues from The Original Series, as Archer and Reed get captured by some pre-warp military goons ensconced in their own feud with an insurgent force, and suspect our heroes as spies. If I had a nickel for every time Kirk and one of his officer got imprisoned on some random planet of the week and had to be sprung (or spring themselves) from captivity without revealing who they really are, I could afford all the deuterium in the galaxy.
I’m not apt to hold the franchise’s 40-year-old tropes against Enterprise too harshly, though even here, it feels like the series is repeating itself a little bit from the episode where Archer and Mayweather were in the Suliban prison camp. The show cooks up a few decent wrinkles, like the escalating interrogation from the locals, their discovery that Archer and Reed have a different physiology, and the District 9-esque decision of “well, I guess we’ll just have to kill and dissect them” to add some stakes.
The catch is that none of these is especially engaging. I try hard not to slate the show too much for the fact that savvy T.V. viewers know the main characters won’t actually die, but it does make it hard to care too much about Archer and Reed’s peril when you just know that Trip and Mayweather’s fiddling with the Suliban scout ship that went all but unmentioned until now is going to allow them to burst in and save the day at some point. The show still tries to sell it as an opportunity for Archer to be the noble, self-sacrificing captain, but as usual, Scott Bakula can’t quite carry the moment.
It also doesn't help that while the show wants us to take this threat and the ethical question at the center of it seriously, it gives us a semi-zany and convenient twist with Trip back up on the ship. When messing with some Suliban cloaking technology gives Trip a temporarily invisible right hand, it feels both like some tonally discordant comedy in an episode the show wants us to take seriously, and an obvious setup for the Enterprise crew to be able to burst in undetected and free their compatriots.
Sure enough, that’s what happens, as the impending death sentence for Archer and Reed forces the rest of the crew to scramble to get the Suliban cloak ship working before the false peril stretches on for too long. What follows is a standard, but solid firefight (that conveniently provides Archer enough time to clamber out of the execution chamber and gather up his non-locked up technology) that allows our main characters to escape.
That’s all typical, paint-by-numbers Star Trek stuff, without much distinctive to call its own. There’s only two points that elevate this one beyond the replacement-level episode. The first is the scene where Archer and Reed contemplate what it means to have to die for this principle. I give Bakula a decent amount of crap, but he sells that conversation very well, and it’s the best-written passage in the episode. The prospect of putting their lives on the line for the proto-Prime Directive causes Archer and Reed to contemplate what it means to be dying for people who hate them and abuse them, and underscores the moral fortitude and personal integrity both are showing by not admitting who they are or violating that principle to save their own skins.
The second thing is what undermines it though -- when T’Pol notes that just seeing their particle weapon and communication and cloaking technology will affect the local society, and that letting the bad guys think they were genetically-altered members of the resistance rather than aliens from beyond the stars is going to change the planetary civilization as well. There’s a Watchmen-esque quality to the results here, where Archer and company went to all this trouble to enact this plan in the idea of effecting some grand societal change, but the truth, or at least the details of it, are just as likely to have the deleterious effect everyone was trying to avoid.
That’s part of why I bristle at Archer and Reed’s scene of soul-searching at the same time I admire it. Yes, it’s a good idea to avoid tampering with the development of other civilizations, but is it really worth dying over? Setting aside the fact that longtime Star Trek fans might be banging on the T.V. screen yelling “why don’t you just beam them out!”, there’s the utilitarian notion that a handful of locals knowing that other life exists in the galaxy, without any evidence to corroborate it, is a price worth paying to save two good officers and noble men.
By the time Reed and Archer are facing execution, they’d already been violating the anthropologist’s code at least a little (by necessity), so what’s the big deal if they let the cat out of the bag, without sharing any technology with the locals? Maybe I’m spoiled by Kirk and even Picard tossing out the Prime Directive when expedient with regularity, but it’s hard for it not to feel like noble stupidity when the episode wants us to think that it’s good and right for Archer and Reed to potentially lose their lives over this.
Still, it is at least a sign that T’Pol’s lessons about the responsibilities of being an interstellar society have sunk in for the vanguard of humanity across the stars. Whether those responsibilities are fair, the principles smart or nuanced enough to capture the infinite complexities of intergalactic study and diplomacy, remains to be seen. But “The Communicator” treats the experience as a Roddenberry-approved test of character, one that humanity passes.