2x04 Dead Stop

[7.6/10] One of my favorite lines from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is “everything has a price.” It’s a good storytelling idea, particularly for genre stories, because otherwise in settings where magic or technology that is indistinguishable from magic could theoretically solve every problem, you need some kind of constraint, whether practical or spiritual, to make sure that’s not the obvious answer to any problem you might throw at your protagonists.

And yet, T’Pol might push back on that idea. When the Enterprise encounters a ship repair facility floating in the depths of space that might double as an automatic car wash from today, Archer is understandably wary. But T’Pol suggests that the facility may be something closer to a lighthouse -- something that a technologically advanced species creates for the good of all passers by, without seeking much in the way of payment or recompense. This crew has met benevolent and technologically advanced species in the past, why couldn’t this be a product of one of them?

Still, savvy Trek fans, and T.V. fans in general, are likely to suspect that it might, instead, be an angler fish, something meant to lure in unsuspecting prey with the promise of help or intrigue, only to snap them up for its own purposes. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is, especially within the confines of a television show that needs conflict and action to entertain its audience.

“Dead Stop” gives us about half an episode’s worth of things going along swimmingly, seeming too good to be true, a quarter of an episode’s worth of a faux-tragedy that brings the episode to a grinding halt, and a final quarter that sees our heroes inevitably uncovering the station’s dark secret and saving the day with quick-thinking, a cunning plan, and the usual array of explosions.

That first half is the most enjoyable. For starters, I just appreciate the continuity that “Dead Stop” offers. The idea that the ship isn’t just unthinkingly repaired, and that Reed isn’t just presto change-o healed from the events of the last episode, is refreshing. That damage poses a real problem, that threatens the Enterprise’s mission in a believable way, and causes realistic challenges for Reed.

The episode turns what might otherwise be an unsatisfying quick fix for these things into a legitimate adventure. Star Trek, as a franchise, is no stranger to crews encountering some amazingly advanced bit of technology that was built and abandoned or lost by a species that’s no longer around. But it’s still cool to see the senior staff wander into the pristine clean control station, witness some (impressively CGI’d) automatic tech that can repair their vessel one hundred times as fast as their teams, and marvel at its replicator. The station is, in a very real sense, a miracle, something that came out of nowhere and saved the Enterprise’s bacon, and even made it so that the lame (in this case Malcolm) could walk.

All the while, Archer has a feeling that something is off here. The minimally-responsive computer interface, the way that the station has scraped all the information from the ship about their biology and history and culture, leaves him uneasy. That discomfort is justified when, in a section of the ship that the repair center had been fixing, Mayweather turns up dead.

It’s here that the episode falls off a cliff. For one thing, the average Trek fan knows that Mayweather is, in all likelihood, not actually dead. It’s not that character never die in Star Trek -- with Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager each having notable exits -- but there’s usually more fanfare about it than this. So while the episode wants to make it seem like a big deal that Mayweather is gone, the headfake is pretty unconvincing which weakens everything that comes after.

A series can make up for that if the actors can create the emotional stakes for a loss like that, but unfortunately Scott Bakula and Linda Park aren’t up to the task here. Archer’s “I’m an angry captain who’s pissed off about the loss of a crewman!” routine is corny as all hell. And Park tries her best with a tearful monologue about how Mayweather was a friendly prankster she’ll never get to see again, but can’t quite pull it off. The entire thing is hobbled by the fact that after a full season, Mayweather’s barely been developed as a character, and it’s not like we’ve seen him and Hoshi hanging out or building a friendship or anything.

Thankfully, after about ten minutes of that nonsense, the episode shifts into the usual problem-solving and escape routine, and becomes much more enjoyable, albeit more apt to deploy narrative shortcuts. Dr. Phlox discovers that the dead body they found is not the real Mayweather, but rather a near-exact duplicate, where the only giveaway is the dead microbes in his bloodstream that should be alive and kicking. He delivers the cheesy but enjoyable irony that for however impressive this device is at repairing and creating massive starships, it’s utterly lost at doing the same for single-celled organisms.

So naturally our heroes break into the core of the ship, and uncover the terrible secret. The repair center is pulling a Matrix, using living bodies as processors for its grand computers. What follows is a pretty standard Star Trek rescue and escape. It’s passably exciting given the distract and search and rescue operation, and the need to blow up the damn thing to escape once the real Mayweather is rescued. (Although the staff seems oddly unperturbed about blowing it up when they know there’s other living beings besides Mayweather aboard.)

But what I really like is the notion that for all the wonders of the universe that Star Trek offers, there is still often a price to be paid. What could otherwise be a nigh-literal deus ex machina to get the Enterprise up and running again instead reveals a horror at the center of all this wondrous technology that so impresses Trip and Malcolm and everyone else. Granted, they still manage to get away while being little worse for wear. But it’s still a darker lesson than Star Trek usually goes for, but one that is compelling in how it lurks in the background of each new boon for the good guys, until they realize they’ve gotten more than they bargained for.