[5.6/10] For me, the greatest sin of a television show is wasted potential. Some episodes are liable to be great. Some episodes are liable to be terrible. A good many more will vary between “fine” and “pretty good.” As I’ve exhaustively detailed on this website, there’s a ton of reasons for that, some of which are understandable and some of which are maddening. But the most frustrating thing when taking in a story of any stripe, is feeling like somebody had a great idea, or great premise, or sniffed greatness, but then left some of the best possibilities on the table.
“The Crossing” leaves more than the best possibilities on the table. It leaves most of the possibilities on the table. The prospect of non-corporeal beings, touring the human body as a vessel of choice through meatspace, is a thrilling one. As “Return to Tomorrow” from The Original Series showed us, the notion of what beings without bodies do once returned to them can be an illuminating experience for the characters and the audience alike.
But Enterprise dispenses with all of that for a rote pod people story. Instead of any philosophical exploration of what it means to encounter a new form of life or the costs of their form of existence versus ours, “The Crossing” does a cheap spin on a horror tale, with Stepford Smilers and “who’ll be brainwashed next?” questions that don’t amount to much beyond some bargain basement scares.
That wouldn’t be so bad if the show’s would be ghost story were any good. As much as I enjoy Star Trek’s more philosophical side, there’s nothing wrong with just telling a simple, creepy tale in the confines of a spaceship. The problem is that the invasion of the “wisps” is pretty dull, and doesn't make much sense.
Most good stories that involve the supernatural (or the “may as well be supernatural”) have rules for how things have to operate. These rules take the nigh-magical and not only ground it in something the audience can relate to, but make the characters earn their success (or failure) in dealing with it. Here, the rules are all so opaque and nonsensical that it’s hard to invest in any of the problems or solutions.
Are you unsure whether or not a fellow crewman is inhabited by a wisp? Well that’s no problem, because Dr. Phlox just invented a wisp detector! Are you running from a being that can go through walls (which, in fairness, are the episode’s best sequences)? Don’t worry about it! These things that the sensors can’t even really detect are repelled by the alloy in the catwalk for some reason! Is a third of your crew infested with these beings who might have evil intentions? That’s fine! We can just gas them out of the ship without any ill effects to the human beings they’re inhabiting! What about that massive alien ship that you can’t outrun and which is so technologically advanced that it takes over all of your systems? Just blow it up!
I’m used to easy Treknobabble solutions to what ought to be thorny problems, and I’m not a nitpicker, but “The Crossing” takes the cake. It stacks arbitrary implausibility on top of arbitrary implausibility until you wonder if the writers even began to think this whole situation through. I’ll concede that there’s something clever about T’Pol using her psychic abilities and disciplined mind to discern the wisps’ plan after one tries to take her over. But for the most part, the episode introduces a series a big, difficult problem and then comes up with all sorts of convenient answers that don’t pass the smell test.
Some of this would be more tolerable if the episode didn’t feel like it was stretching to fit the required runtime. My compliment for the last episode was that it knew how to evolve its central problem to create new challenges for our heroes to overcome. “The Crossing” does nearly the opposite, giving us the gist of the problem early on and then letting us watch Archer and company tread water for most the episode before figuring out how to solve it. In the meantime, we get a bunch of lifeless scenes of Archer yelling generic missives at his wisp-possessed crewmen and, bafflingly, multiple silly fight scenes starring Dr. Phlox: action star.
The episode also tosses in some weird sexual harassment material with the wisp who possesses Malcolm which is, dare I say, problematic. Either it’s meant to be a source of menace, in which case it feels cheap and especially galling for the show to try to pull that crap using T’Pol as the victim again. Or it’s meant as comedy, which may be even worse. There’s something interesting about a non-corporeal being experiencing sexual curiosity and desire, without understanding human mores, but Enterprise doesn't have the skill to explore that fraught material with any grace or nuance, and the whole thing comes off as uncomfortable for other reasons than what the show seems to be going for.
That’s the cinch to all of “The Crossing.” There’s grand metaphysical questions at play about what it’s like for a being without a body to suddenly find itself able to talk and eat and feel again, and for a human to suddenly experience the world through a different lens. There’s grand ethical questions about whether it’s right for a wisp to do this, and how much leeway to give a species that’s long removed from issues of bodily autonomy. And there’s compelling moral dilemmas about a group of dying lifeforms seeking salvation and how we measure their lives against ours.
But Enterprise just blows them up, literally and figuratively. Gone are the engrossing questions of different forms of life, and in comes a procedural horror story that’s rife with boring interludes and quick fixes. When the series had the chance to tell us a story about the famed “new life and new civilizations” from the once-famous, now-jettisoned intro, it gave us a mostly-fine but uninspired possession story that barely bothered to graze any of the imaginative qualities and curiosity that made Star Trek great.
I can handle bad Star Trek episodes. Hell, I love some of them. What I truly don’t like are episodes like this, that feel like they waste something great to settle for something less.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-07-08T22:46:57Z
[5.6/10] For me, the greatest sin of a television show is wasted potential. Some episodes are liable to be great. Some episodes are liable to be terrible. A good many more will vary between “fine” and “pretty good.” As I’ve exhaustively detailed on this website, there’s a ton of reasons for that, some of which are understandable and some of which are maddening. But the most frustrating thing when taking in a story of any stripe, is feeling like somebody had a great idea, or great premise, or sniffed greatness, but then left some of the best possibilities on the table.
“The Crossing” leaves more than the best possibilities on the table. It leaves most of the possibilities on the table. The prospect of non-corporeal beings, touring the human body as a vessel of choice through meatspace, is a thrilling one. As “Return to Tomorrow” from The Original Series showed us, the notion of what beings without bodies do once returned to them can be an illuminating experience for the characters and the audience alike.
But Enterprise dispenses with all of that for a rote pod people story. Instead of any philosophical exploration of what it means to encounter a new form of life or the costs of their form of existence versus ours, “The Crossing” does a cheap spin on a horror tale, with Stepford Smilers and “who’ll be brainwashed next?” questions that don’t amount to much beyond some bargain basement scares.
That wouldn’t be so bad if the show’s would be ghost story were any good. As much as I enjoy Star Trek’s more philosophical side, there’s nothing wrong with just telling a simple, creepy tale in the confines of a spaceship. The problem is that the invasion of the “wisps” is pretty dull, and doesn't make much sense.
Most good stories that involve the supernatural (or the “may as well be supernatural”) have rules for how things have to operate. These rules take the nigh-magical and not only ground it in something the audience can relate to, but make the characters earn their success (or failure) in dealing with it. Here, the rules are all so opaque and nonsensical that it’s hard to invest in any of the problems or solutions.
Are you unsure whether or not a fellow crewman is inhabited by a wisp? Well that’s no problem, because Dr. Phlox just invented a wisp detector! Are you running from a being that can go through walls (which, in fairness, are the episode’s best sequences)? Don’t worry about it! These things that the sensors can’t even really detect are repelled by the alloy in the catwalk for some reason! Is a third of your crew infested with these beings who might have evil intentions? That’s fine! We can just gas them out of the ship without any ill effects to the human beings they’re inhabiting! What about that massive alien ship that you can’t outrun and which is so technologically advanced that it takes over all of your systems? Just blow it up!
I’m used to easy Treknobabble solutions to what ought to be thorny problems, and I’m not a nitpicker, but “The Crossing” takes the cake. It stacks arbitrary implausibility on top of arbitrary implausibility until you wonder if the writers even began to think this whole situation through. I’ll concede that there’s something clever about T’Pol using her psychic abilities and disciplined mind to discern the wisps’ plan after one tries to take her over. But for the most part, the episode introduces a series a big, difficult problem and then comes up with all sorts of convenient answers that don’t pass the smell test.
Some of this would be more tolerable if the episode didn’t feel like it was stretching to fit the required runtime. My compliment for the last episode was that it knew how to evolve its central problem to create new challenges for our heroes to overcome. “The Crossing” does nearly the opposite, giving us the gist of the problem early on and then letting us watch Archer and company tread water for most the episode before figuring out how to solve it. In the meantime, we get a bunch of lifeless scenes of Archer yelling generic missives at his wisp-possessed crewmen and, bafflingly, multiple silly fight scenes starring Dr. Phlox: action star.
The episode also tosses in some weird sexual harassment material with the wisp who possesses Malcolm which is, dare I say, problematic. Either it’s meant to be a source of menace, in which case it feels cheap and especially galling for the show to try to pull that crap using T’Pol as the victim again. Or it’s meant as comedy, which may be even worse. There’s something interesting about a non-corporeal being experiencing sexual curiosity and desire, without understanding human mores, but Enterprise doesn't have the skill to explore that fraught material with any grace or nuance, and the whole thing comes off as uncomfortable for other reasons than what the show seems to be going for.
That’s the cinch to all of “The Crossing.” There’s grand metaphysical questions at play about what it’s like for a being without a body to suddenly find itself able to talk and eat and feel again, and for a human to suddenly experience the world through a different lens. There’s grand ethical questions about whether it’s right for a wisp to do this, and how much leeway to give a species that’s long removed from issues of bodily autonomy. And there’s compelling moral dilemmas about a group of dying lifeforms seeking salvation and how we measure their lives against ours.
But Enterprise just blows them up, literally and figuratively. Gone are the engrossing questions of different forms of life, and in comes a procedural horror story that’s rife with boring interludes and quick fixes. When the series had the chance to tell us a story about the famed “new life and new civilizations” from the once-famous, now-jettisoned intro, it gave us a mostly-fine but uninspired possession story that barely bothered to graze any of the imaginative qualities and curiosity that made Star Trek great.
I can handle bad Star Trek episodes. Hell, I love some of them. What I truly don’t like are episodes like this, that feel like they waste something great to settle for something less.