4x12 Babel One (1)

[7.7/10] Part of new showrunner Manny Cotto’s M.O. when he took over Enterprise was to include more callbacks and connections to prior Star Trek shows, especially The Original Series. That nostalgic approach can be a double-edged sword for any franchise. Sure, there’s the juice of seeing familiar characters or locations or artifacts from a series. But at the same time, if all a show can offer is “hey, remember that thing you used to like?” the trick starts to get old quickly.

It’s easy to have that concern with an episode like “Babel One”, an episode that, based on its name alone, harkens back to the episode of TOS that introduced some of Star Trek’s earliest alien species. Sure enough, the episode features a clash involving the Andorians and the Tellarites, the very species at odds in 1967’s “Journey to Babel” (which naturally made me assume that the Orions were the real villains here). Instead, it turns out to be the Romulans, one of Star Trek’s most noteworthy baddies, who persistently acted as a thorn in Picard’s side during The Next Generation.

And yet, what I like about “Babel One” is that you don’t really need to know any of that history for the episode to work. All that really matters is that our heroes are mediating a possibly treaty between Species A and Species B, who blame one another for missing ships and interstellar mishaps, while the mysterious Species C is secretly fanning the flames of discord between them with its own hidden interests in mind. It focuses on the humans’ first big step into the diplomatic world of the Alpha Quadrant, and crafts a compelling interspecies dynamic at the core of it.

Of course, it certainly helps if you know that the Andorians are traditionally militant and suspicious, the Tellarites are usually combative and challenging, and the Romulans are typically conniving and secretive. And there’s certainly a thrill for longtime fans to see a Babel redux here, with these events acting as a precursor to the ones that Kirk and Spock and Sarek would helps resolve almost a hundred in-universe years later.

But you don’t really need to know that to enjoy the setup. For one thing, the interludes with the Tellarites before the plot kicks into gear are just fun regardless of whether you’re familiar with them. The whole schtick of Archer having to be mutually complaining/insulting to earn their respect creates a certain comic energy and cultural exchange we haven’t had much of on the show in a while. Just the mixing of different species and norms and demeanors is one of the traditionally fun things about Star Trek, and it’s nice to get a little of that back again.

Even once the plot does take over though, we get another great turn from Shran, and the mutual finger-pointing of the Andorians and Tellerites. As much of an Archer-hater as I tend to be, there’s something about his dynamic with Shran that just works. The tense but mutual respect the men share mitigates Archer’s “just a guy in a uniform off the assembly line” qualities and gives the much more fiery and tendentious Shran a straight man to play off of.

Archer’s even more compelling when he’s trying to hold this fragile chance at peace together. The show does well to create a mystery, or at least a conflict, when Shran’s ship is seemingly destroyed by a Tellarite vessel in the cold open, and Enterprise is nearly blasted to smithereens by what appears to be an Andorian vessel later in the episode. Most viewers will be able to guess that there’s more to these attacks than what they seem, but it provides good reason for both Shran and the Tellarite Ambassador Gral to blame the other and force Archer to have to dig deep to quell tempers and avoid the scuttling of this conference.

Of course it turns out that it’s actually the Romulans at fault for all of this, and despite my continuity-based queasiness at getting them involved here, the show actually makes a lot of smart choices here. It has T’Pol make an educated guess that the Romulans are the culprits based on the attacking ships having the same energy signature as the mine that attached itself to the hull seasons ago. The Romulans’ holographic projection technology makes for a natural forerunner to their cloaking technology in the TOS period. And while it seems a little overly prescient, their acting to throttle any potential alliance between Andorians and Tellarites, let alone other species in the Alpha Quadrant, makes good strategic sense from the territory-minded aliens.

There’s also some cool set design choices at play, as both the interior and exterior of the ship design is distinctive, vaguely insectoid, and definitely creepy in a way that makes it stand out. In particular, the figure at the center of the Romulan “bridge”, hooked up or plugged into a body-sized series of lights and controls and wires, is a striking image of body horror, especially as they spin and wiggle their fingers and otherwise seem to straddle the live between being alive and being some sort of mechanical hub.

That all ties nicely into the final twist. After a close shave with their oxygen tanks, a near-kidnapped Trip and Malcolm stumble onto the bridge of the Romulan ship, only to find it deserted. It turns out that the ship is being remotely controlled, and the Romulans themselves are piloting it from the safety of their homeworld! The reveal doesn't accomplish very much, beyond preserving the fact that humans still haven’t laid eyes on Romulans before Kirk’s time, and yet it gives the show a nice “duuuuun duuuun duuuuuuuuun” moment to go out on.

But even if you don’t know that continuity tidbit, it still shows that the Romulans are a force to be reckoned with, that their tech is serious, and that it’ll be harder to get them, let alone stop them, then an uninitiated viewer might have thought. What’s good about “Babel One” is that it’s modular. If you know the stories and species and scenarios that the episode is nodding to, it has some extra oomph to it. Without that, it’s still a solid setup for our heroes being at the center of a conflagration involving three alien species, where even the ever-confident Archer worries that humanity may be in over its head.