1x18 Rogue Planet

[5.1/10] One of my most frequent complaints about The Original Series is that it would have about twenty minutes worth of plot stretched out to a full episode length. The pacing of T.V. shows was different in the 1960s, but even so, you can only try to ruminate on some small amount of incident for so long before the whole thing just becomes boring. With “Rogue Planet”, Enterprise seems to be imitating its primogenitor on that account.

If you’ve watched any amount of Star Trek, you could probably predict the plot of this one in about ten minutes. Archer and company run into a group of alien hunters who are on the titular rogue planet for a sporting excursion. There’s some tension between the groups given T’Pol’s Vulcan vegetarianism that hunting has apparently fallen out of fashion on Earth a century prior, but the whole cultural relativism thing keeps everyone getting along. Then, in a private moment, Archer sees a random beautiful woman who knows his name and who rings a bell in the back of his mind, who’s treated like an apparition or a delusion by both his crewmates and the new alien friends who are sharing their campground with the Starfleet officers.

It doesn't take long to guess that the woman is some manifestation of the planet, asking Archer to help save her from the hunters. This is Star Trek, so despite the headfake of Enterprise’s hallucinogenic spore episode earlier in the season, we can reasonably suspect the woman is more than just a random hallucination from Archer. The episode spends way too long with Archer wrestling with that fact, until the hunters finally admit that she is a “wraith”, a sort of space slug that’s native to the planet and which tries to defend itself by “getting into the head” of the humanoids hunting it.

That’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s a neat enough concept to build the episode around. The problem is, Enterprise doesn't reveal that until about 75% of the way through the episode, and doesn't really develop anything beyond that point. There’s the slightest of slight interesting clash between Starfleet’s impulse not to interfere with other cultures’ beliefs and practices and its impulse to protect all sentient life. But we never hit any really pressure points with that. Archer (with the help of Phlox), just treknobabbles his way to having his cake and eating it too, giving the space slugs a treatment that allows them to avoid detection by the hunters.

And that’s it! There’s a predictable mystery as to what the nature of the mysterious woman is. There’s a predictable reveal as to what the conflict between her and the hunters is. And there’s a predictable, all-too-easy solution to the issue that doesn't require any real challenge or sacrifice from our heroes. Enterprise labors over those basic plot points for forty minutes without much, if anything, to show for it.

This is also an Archer-heavy episode, which weakens things in my book. The show once again seems to want to place him in the Kirk role, lusting after vaguely-sketched women from his past on a strange planet (see: “Shore Leave”) with whom he has some faux-meaningful exchange before she disappears forever. “Archer falls in love with a space slug” is an idea just weird enough to work, but this is about the dullest possible execution of that idea.

“Rogue Planet” tries to elevate that interspecies infatuation to the idea of “reaching for the unobtainable.” Archer eventually connects that the woman is the image his mind conjured as a child when his mom used to read him a poem by Yeats. The poem was about a man who caught a fish that turned into a beautiful woman and disappeared, that he then chased for the rest of his life. It’s a thin connection, but there’s a solid enough idea there about continuing to search for meaning and beauty in the universe even when it seems vast and impossible. But the delivery of that message is trite, and stapled to a flat, almost procedurally generated episode.

So what’s good about “Rogue Planet”? Well, while it looks a little silly at times, there’s something kind of cool looking about seeing both the hunters and the away team rolling around with their little laser tag outfits. As usual, T’Pol is a beneficial presence here, with her barely-restrained disdain and cuttingly-worded retorts for the hunters being both amusing and potent, and her skepticism about Archer’s visions being well-founded despite the inevitability of there being more to them than meets the eye. And again, it’s bold, to say the least, to center an episode around the reveal that Archer is trying to romance an alien snail who’s taken the form of his childhood fantasy.

The execution of that premise should just be way more interesting than this is. Archer’s concern for sentient life is admirable, but “Rogue Planet” quickly sheds the intriguing thought of whether Archer would be so apt to help if the slug had taken on the form of a scantily clad man. There’s intriguing notions of adaptation, how both predators and prey evolve to attack or defend themselves through unique methods, that have some juice, and would be seen very differently by the hunters and the hunted, but the episode mainly elides them in favor of Archer going all moony-eyed over his ghost lady.

Lord knows that Star Trek has made a home for any number of unusual romance over the past fifty years, from various men and women falling in love with various forms of artificial intelligence, to women falling for dreamy psychic aliens, to Zephram Cochrane himself learning to love a wild energy being. But those stories all leaned into the strangeness of those setups, exploring them beyond some vague metaphor for continuing to go after the impossible. This is, by contrast, an episode that feels made of spare parts, hardly able to capture your attention with its telegraphed reveals and boring, overstretched escapades.