4x05 Cold Station 12 (2)

[7.2/10] So often in Star Trek, and pop culture generally, the rubric for whether you’re good or bad is whether you’re willing to take a life. The more apt you are to end someone else's existence in cold blood, the less apt you are to sacrifice anything and everything to avoid the human cost of a situation, the more a story is likely to position you as the evil to end all evils.

It’s interesting then, how Enterprise uses its own series of Trolley Problems, its own set of experiments on who is willing and able to kill, to sort out who’s good and who’s bad within this augment arc and, in the process, creates the show’s most morally complicated character thus far.

That character is, naturally, Arik Soong. He is the nominal bad guy in this arc (or at least a plain antihero). He’s in jail for breaking the law and performing genetic experiments that have been forbidden. He throws Archer and others under the bus in order to escape, save his own skin, and complete his plan. And here in particular, he uses physical violence and deadly viruses in order to try to intimidate innocent people into giving him what he wants.

And yet, there’s an argument that he values life more than anyone else at the titular station or on the Enterprise. If anything, there’s an argument that he takes that to an extreme. When his augment children want to just take out life support on the station and wait it out for the souls aboard to die before retaking their embryonic brethren, Soong demurs. In the episode’s most tense moment, he tries to use the threat of a colleague’s death to convince station head Dr. Lucas to give him the key codes, but relents at the last minute when he can’t bear that man’s continued suffering or stand to have that blood on his hands.

Hell, there’s an argument that his entire mission is one of extreme devotion to saving lives by any means necessary. He aims to revive the frozen embryos from the Eugenics Wars because he views them as people worthy of existence in a way no one else does. He’s willing to cross lines in law and ethics because he thinks his work could save lives and reduce suffering. His methods are threatening and dangerous, but the show adds layers to Soong by depicting him as someone devoted to notions of the preservation and improvement of life, ideals we find laudable, while also depicting him as doing some horrid stuff in pursuit of those ideals. That puts him in a no-man’s land between good and bad that Enterprise rarely explores.

But maybe it’s just to draw a contrast between Soong and his figurative offspring. The true villain of the piece is Malik, the new Augment leader who ascends to calling the shot after murdering his brother. Malik has no compunction about killing anyone who stands in his way. In addition to his brother, Malik is the one who threatens Dr. Phlox and sets the station to let loose a serious of viruses before his compatriots make their escape. He’s aghast that Soong pulls back at the last minute from killing their hostage. And he even shoots another of his “brothers” for being weak and siding with the humans.

In that, the show argues that this is the inevitable result of genetic engineering, of making one group of people better than another, at least when it comes to humans. Archer has one of those traditional Star Trek navel-gazing conversations with Phlox about where humanity went wrong on genetic engineering, and chalks it up to an asymmetry between intellect and instinct. Maybe that’s meant as an indictment of these augments who were, in a sense, created more than a century ago, but maybe it’s a rare bit of humility from Archer to admit that Soong’s technique may not be inherently bad, but that humanity may simply not be mature enough as a species right now to be able to use it safely and ethically.

Enterprise dramatizes that idea in the only way it knows how: with hostage taking and explosions and botched attempts to set a self-destruct sequence. “Cold Station 12” isn’t as enjoyable as the prior episode, if only because it focuses more on Malik and his machinations and less on Soong and Spiner’s scenery-chewing good time. But it still makes some deft choices, like having Phlox’s pen pal be the guy the augments are torturing for information (played by the “Jump to Conclusions” mat guy from Office Space!), or introducing a sympathetic augment, to help add a human dimension to what’s otherwise a pretty standard threat scenario.

That “weak” augment, Smike, works as a living representation of the idea that the augments aren’t evil just because they’re augments, but rather that a combination of Soong’s warnings that humans hate them, and that sense of superiority doomed the others as believing that other lives have less inherent value than their own. Smike’s death is tragic, but telling, because he’s the only decent one among the augments, and yet it’s treated as a sign of weakness by Malik, and an executable offense on that account.

But it isn’t one to Soong. Soong seems genuinely aghast that Malik killed Rhakim in the prior episode (even with Malik’s made up self-defense story). He has a legitimate fatherly joy in seeing Smike again (something reflected in the weirdly filmed clip of him celebrating the augments’ birthday when they were children). Soong gives Smike a hug and tells him he understands even when Smike says he wants to stay with the humans. There’s a loyalty and devotion to these “children” in Soong, and again, it makes him relatable, even sympathetic, despite his siding with them and using them to thwart our heroes. That his children violate these principles themselves seems to suggest that something of a face turn is in the offing.

I’ll admit, it’s more interesting to contemplate those character dynamics than to delve too deeply into the nuts and bolts of the episode, which try one’s patience a little with the one-location, one problem setup with few wrinkles or developments. Still, the episode use the mortality of the situation, who deploys it, withstands it, and beats back against it, as a measuring stick for whom we should care about, whom we should admire, and whom we should root for. Soong hasn’t firmly made it to the side of the angels yet, but “Cold Station 12” gives us reason not to write him off, and in that, makes him one of the show’s most unique and morally complicated characters.