3x22 The Council

[6.4/10] Man, this was a lot of predictable table-setting. I’m not saying Enterprise needs to surprise us at every turn. That becomes a problem all its own (see: Westworld). I’m not saying it can’t take time to build to its big moments. It’s a good thing to include setup! But things here were dull when they’re meant to be exciting, and deflated when they’re supposed to be tense, when it’s obvious where things are going to end up.

We’re going to get Archer and the good guy Xindi specieses vs. the sphere-builders and the bad guy Xindi specieses. That was plain before the episode began and an unexciting placemarker for the story at the end of the episode too. “The Council” wants to put a lot of stakes on Archer’s presentation to the titular Xindi governing body, with the Aquatics, who like to mull everything, as the deciding vote between alliance and war.

And yet it’s a false conflict, because you’d have to be a fool to think that the snarling, extra-villainous Reptilians and the personality-free mugs from the Insectoids would ever go along with accepting the humans. Civil war becomes the clear destination before Archer ever walks into the council chambers, which makes all the grand efforts to persuade one side or another of this or that feel like pointless water-treading prior to the inevitable schism.

There’s nothing wrong with taking the time to show why any Xindi would side with the humans after all of this. It’s part of what I liked in the B-story for “The Forgotten.” But after Degra was willing to destroy his own people’s ship to preserve the fragile alliance, and in the absence of any new evidence, the die had pretty much been cast already, making it hard for the fiftieth
Archer speech to carry too much weight.

Archer and Degra using Aquatic technology to recreate the corpse of one of the Sphere-Builders to persuade the more visual Aquatics to their side is pretty underwhelming as a big moment on that. The least you can say for it is that it sets up and knocks down a specific problem vis-a-vis the Aquatics. But it’s a weird, treknobabble solution to what’s supposed to be a more rhetorical proposition, that doesn't really prove much of anything beyond what Archer and his allies have already said and done.

It doesn't help that at this point, the show is basically just spackling lore and plot detail on with no build or setup whatsoever. Now, the Sphere-Builders are the Big Bads of the season, which feels a little off considering we barely met any of them until 2/3rds of the way through the season. The best Enterprise can do at representing their “transdimensional” realm is putting all of them in puffs of white smoke and panning artificially between them, in an effect that comes off really hokey.

On top of that, we’re discovering that the Sphere-Builders are revered by the Xindi, known as The Guardians within their culture, and have helped the different Xindi species for ages and ages, despite the fact that no Xindi has mentioned any of this even once until now! Along with the aforementioned “her”, you can just tell the show is building this season-length arc like the Leaning Tower of Pisa -- stacking thing on top of thing without a real plan or blueprint for how to keep the structure level.

There’s two good things to say about this one. The first is that Degra’s death comes as a true surprise, and one that has major consequences. He has been the face of the good guy Xindi for the whole season, and Archer’s closest ally among them, so without him to be their champions, the dynamic for all of this really changes. Degra has, thus far at least, been the only Xindi character worth a damn, the only one to be meaningfully developed, so his demise has an impact, both in terms of plot and a more personal meaning to the loss.

At the same time, his death scene is shot particularly well. The way the Evil Xindi General’s head protrusions enter the frame in shadow before he himself does creates a sense of a foreboding. And the low external lighting helps set the mood. This is Enterprise going big and operating and arguably even Shakespearean with all of these murders and monologues. It can’t always pull that tone off, but the presentation helps.

So does Randy Oglesby as Degra. I haven’t really praised his performance much, but this script in particular feeds Degra a ton of big, cheesy speeches, that require Oglesby to give a scene-chewing, gravitas-filled performance of conviction each time, and each time he makes those oratories better than they have any right to be. There’s a lot of big emotions and big declarations in these moments, but Oglesby makes them sound plausible as coming from a human being, which is no small feat.

The other is the episode’s broader effects work, particularly in the sequences with T’Pol, Reed, and Mayweather inside one of the spheres. Granted, the Sphere-Builder realm looks ridiculous, and there’s a certain “fighting a screensaver” quality to the away team’s skirmishes with the sphere’s giant claws. But the practical set they operate within calls to mind the outstanding V’Ger set from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the show manages to extract some tension from the setting. In the same way, while a little busy, the ream of dogfighting as the Reptilians try to launch the weapon at the end is visually thrilling.

We even get a redshirt death! One of the MACOs, whose name I didn’t know and whose name I will never know again, comes along on the mission essentially just so that the episode can kill him off. It leads to an out of place and unconvincing monologue from Reed about all these “acceptable losses” and how they’re getting to him, but even that feels like setup for something else to come rather than an organic part of this episode.

It’s an affliction most of “The Council” shares. This is the prelude to the finale fireworks, and rather than delivering on one last chance to take stock or flip the script on the audience before the explosions and dramatics begin, Enterprise just thumps along to its inevitable destination, a war between the friendly mammalian species and the evil, scarier looking species. As the series looks to wrap up, or at least put an exclamation point on, its biggest continuing arc, it should do more in the lead-up than just spinning its wheels.