3x19 Damage

[7.3/10] Man the timing of this one is awkward. Sure, there’s connections at the margins to the larger plot machinations of the season, but for the most part this is a standalone episode. That’s an odd fit considering the last episode ended with an “oh god the bad guys have Archer and the ship is breaking apart!” cliffhanger, and everything goes back to the quasi-status quo about five minutes into this episode.

But that’s the inherent strange fit when you try to do a continuing storyline on a 20+ episode season. For seasons of that length, you almost inevitably don’t have enough plot to fill it and so have to do some sidequests and standalone adventures. That sort of thing is less noticeable in the early stages, when you’re just building up or inching your way toward the major threat. But once the conflict is in full gear, it’s odd, at best, when the show kind of hits pause on it to go deal with some more minor morality plays or personal issues because that’s what the season-length pacing requires.

Still, “Damage” at least gives us the fig leaf that Degra, and maybe some of the other good guy Xindi species, believe Archer and so want to hold off on destroying Enterprise while they do some combination of stalling for time and plotting against the bad guy Xindi. We see him meeting with one of the transdimensional sphere-builders (presumably the ominously referenced “she” from the last episode), and get hints at divisions between the various Xindi species, but it’s mainly just a few teases with the usual loud dramatic tones. The only real piece-moving happens when Degra secretly signals Archer that the weapon (or some other big deal thing) is going to be at a particular set of coordinates in three days time.

That prompts the meat of the episode, where the Enterprise implausibly runs into another unaligned, damaged ship in the part of space where the Xindi weapon is being built, and comes to their aid. The captain of the ship asks for Trellium D, and Archer offers to trade it to them in exchange for a warp core, after the Enterprise’s melted in the battle from the last episode. The alien captain offers his sympathies, but explains that it will take him and his crew three years to get back to their home world, something they’re not equipped for, if he were to trade away the warp core, so the two part without any trade going down.

Everything changes, however, when Hoshi and others figure out Degra’s signal, and suddenly it becomes imperative that the Enterprise make it to those coordinates, something they’ll need a warp coil to accomplish. It leads to a trademark moral dilemma for the show, where Archer has to decide whether his morals and principles will allow him to take the warp coil by force subject the alien ship to that journey against their will given that the fate of his people depends on him intervening against the Xindi and their superweapon.

It’s a strong moral dilemma to tease out where Starfleet morality stands in a time of war. The show sets up both the sympathetic nature of the aliens and the necessity involved in the Enterprise’s circumstances well. It’s not one of those abstract “Who are we to erase this last vestige of an ancient alien culture” sort of problems, but rather one where the answer is clear but the ethical sacrifices involved are difficult, no matter how much you tell yourself it’s justified under the circumstances.

Unfortunately, the episode’s B-story leaves much more to be desired. It turns out that T’Pol has secretly been addicted to space crack for the last three months, and now she’s going through withdrawal and other more extreme symptoms in the process that threaten her ability to ably serve as first officer.

There’s tons of problems with this plot, chief among them being that drug addiction is yet another real life topic that Enterprise is sadly just not equipped to do justice to. There’s something noble about the show taking these big swings and trying to be vaguely topical from time to time, but the timing her is odd and the execution leaves much to be desired. If we learned nothing else from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s that we should look askance UPN shows doing addiction storylines.

There’s also the sheer implausibility of this out of nowhere development. Sure, if you squint and contort things here and there, you can try to chalk up her feelings for Sim, her relations with Trip, and other tense moments over the course of this season to T’Pol being vaguely strung out. But (a.) that feels like a retcon at best given that T’Pol mostly seemed like herself in all these moments and (b.) it reduces the personal growth and feeling that T’Pol has displayed over time to a chemical reaction. That’s disappointing for a number of reasons, and reduces the journey T’Pol’s been on over the course of the show to a weak, out of the blue addiction story.

That story feels almost standalone as well, given that it has only the barest minimum to do with the larger warp coil retrieval story. T’Pol just gets a shot; she’s steady enough to command the bridge while Archer is off on the retrieval mission, and we get some vaguely-worded warnings from Phlox that T’Pol’s recovery won’t be easy. The rest of the episode’s events, important though they may be, don’t really involve her beyond a superficial connection to targeting the Enterprise’s weapons.

Still, that decision contributes to the tightrope our heroes have to walk, where they have to disarm and disable the alien ship enough to where Archer, Trip, and company can get in and nab the warp core, but not enough to make it impossible for the aliens to safely return to their homeworld.

What follows is another big firefight, this time amid the alien ship. I know I praised these early on, and they’re all creditably staged and blocked, but the show’s gone to that well so many times that it’s just kind of dull at this point. We know Archer and company are going to make it, and there’s not much genuine question of whether or not they’ll find a way to get what they need and get out safely.

Nevertheless, what makes “Damage” interesting is the fact that you know the Enterprise retrieval team will succeed, but that it’ll cost them a piece of their souls to do it. Sure, the episode belabors that point, with overwrought conversations between Archer and Trip or Dr. Phlox, where he waxes pained over these decisions. But more so than the overblown airlock scene, this episode presents a genuine ethical conundrum, where saving billions of lives means subjecting dozens of uninvolved souls to hardship and uncertainty on your account.

The reminder that those choices are as soul-staining as they are necessary is a good one amid all this wartime decision-making. The episode takes the problem seriously, arguably even too seriously, given the amount of didactic brooding we’re introduced to. Still, it’s an awkward time for that lesson, smushed in between the show’s big overarching arc drama installments, but it’s a worthwhile idea to explore, whatever the circumstances.