2x17 Canamar

[7.3/10] One of the keys to a good story, particularly an action/adventure type story, is escalation. Whatever the conflict or problem was needs to increase or evolve as events march on, to keep from making things to dull or predictable or stretched out. That can be a problem sometimes, as there’s easy tropes and conventions for accomplishing that sort of escalation which quickly become tired. But done right, it helps hold a viewer’s interest from beginning to end.

“Canamar” takes that notion to heart. From the initial premise of “Archer and Trip are mistaken for smugglers and imprisoned on an alien transport,” the episode spins out a prisoner revolt, a collaborate cover story, pursuit by reinforcements, life or death stakes, and the Enterprise’s own rescue attempts to build that simple idea up into a problem that takes the full forty-two minutes to solve. The proceedings rarely feel overstuffed or stretched out (save for some extended filibustering in the last act), but instead provide a solid and sound bit of television.

So what keeps “Canamar” from being rated higher? The characters aren’t especially interesting and the philosophical underpinnings of the episode are compelling in the abstract, but glancing at best in execution.

Those two problems collide in the form of Kuroda, an Enolian prisoner on the transport who takes over the ship in an effort to avoid returning to the local prison colony. The episode spends a great deal of time on Kuroda’s backstory, trying to account for why he’s so desperate to avoid returning to the clink, and explaining some of his cravenness. But the performance isn’t especially memorable, and in the end, the character comes off as just another mercenary tough, with a solid motivation but nothing in terms of presence or personality to make him distinctive.

The most laudable effort in “Canamar” comes when it tries to suggest that there’s an unjust and vicious cycle for people like Kuroda. That clunkily-delivered backstory tells us that he was (at least ostensibly) imprisoned as a child for a crime he didn’t commit. That five year sentence kept him from learning upright productive skills and instead taught him how to be a skilled criminal. When he got out, he began a life as an outlaw, and when caught, had such a miserable experience as a prisoner that he was willing to kill a transport full of people, and eventually end his own life, rather than go back to it.

There’s some strong moral opprobrium and social commentary there which, whether or not you agree with it, seems true to Star Trek’s ethos. The suggestion is that Kuroda could have led a good life that would have been better for him and his society, but that railroading and rough justice at a young age set him on this path. There’s also an implicit critique of prison experiences that are so bad that people would rather die than endure them. And last, but not least, there’s a strong sense of oblivious bureaucratic bodies mistakenly sweeping up innocent people in the name of safety and security, and turning them into the very sorts of threats they’re trying to mitigate.

The catch is that, is as often the pitfall for Enterprise, this is either undercooked or thrown in the audience’s face. The exposition about Kuroda’s past in particular is “generic tragic backstory #7” without much in the way of character. And even Kuroda’s repeated “I won’t go back!” declarations feel like the statements of writers trying to make a point rather than those points realized through an actual human being.

Still, the premise and the escalation do a lot of the work here. The other big thing that “Canamar” has going for it is Archer’s cover identity gambit. Scott Bakula is not necessarily great at trying to play Han Solo, but his decision to portray himself as a genuine scoundrel for whom “Starship Captain” was a cover is a clever one. It’s fun to see him try to walk the line between his scoundrel put-on and his genuine upstanding moral code. And his schemes, from enlisting Trip in a second takeover, to signaling the Enterprise, work as nice solutions to new problems that arise as the story goes on.

The biggest is how to maintain that cover while saving the lives of the people on board. Archer sells himself, and his value, as a pilot who Kuroda needs to get the ship where it’s going. But in the process, he learns of Kuroda’s plan to have the prison transport crash land on the surface of a nearby planet after he makes his escape, so as to make his pursuers think he died in a crash. Archer can’t live with that, and even when he’s deploying old tricks on new enemies to escape Enolian pursuers, he refuses to go that far and has to find some alternative scheme (assuming he can pull it off before Trip dies of annoyance from his broadly comic, motor-mouthed seatmate).

Therein lies the real strength of “Canamar.” A simple first contact mission begets an accidental arrest. The accidental arrest begets Archer and Trip being involved in a small-scale prisoner mutiny. The mutiny begets Archer having to pretend to be a rogue to get some control of the situation. His effort to have some control begets having to walk the line between going along with Kuroda’s plan long enough to plot an escape without crossing any moral lines. Those moral breaking points beget tricks played on Nausicaan confederates, more subterfuge, and a Big Damn Heroes rescue from the Enterprise.

“Camanar” is, otherwise, a pretty unremarkable Enterprise episode on paper. It devolves into some standard issue firefights and fisticuffs in the third act, and garbles a lot of the moral force and commentary it wants to translate to the viewer here. But by just getting the nuts and bolts of an escalating conflict right, by having their be meaningful, building challenges that our heroes have to think and plan their way through, it becomes on where you’re still glad to be along for the ride.