3x05 Impulse

[8.6/10] Vulcan Rage Zombies! I don’t know that a short form zombie flick is ever something I would have asked for from Star Trek as a franchise, let alone Enterprise, but damn am I glad to have received it. (Though obviously many of the Borg encounters fit that vibe.) For a while now, the series had struggled to reliably do the sorts of “big grand exploration” stories that prior shows excelled at. But it seems to have found a niche for action and added horror to its quiver of arrows as well.

The premise of “Impulse” is that the Enterprise encounters a Vulcan ship in the midst of the Delphic Expanse that’s emitting an automated distress signal. It turns out to a ship that T’Pol served on before she joined the diplomatic consulate, so it becomes personal when they venture to board the ship, and discover that everyone aboard has turned into mindless, primitive killing machines.

That creates a standard but effective escape narrative Our heroes are trapped on the Vulcan ship, that’s already been damaged after weeks, maybe months of turmoil, and have to find a way back to their shuttle, despite the presence of 140+ super strong, metal club-wielding Vulcans roaming the decks and attacking anything that crosses paths with them. It’s a simple goal that provides an excuse for the show to come up with any number of fun zombie set pieces.

Do our heroes have to run down the hallways and stun a seemingly endless parade of attackers as they search for safety? Yes they do, and it leads to an important moment of concern whether to use the “stun” or “kill” setting on their phase pistols. Do the good guys have to escape through the ceiling of Vulcan bridge because the pointy-eared zombies are pushing their grasping hands through the door? They sure do, and it takes a last second escape to keep them safe. Do they even have to tightrope walk over a steel beam and a pit below while those same zombies are advancing from behind! You betcha, and while the show milks the drama a bit, it’s a cool and intense sequence.

“Impulse” does really well with this stuff. The show creates a real sense of atmosphere, with darker lighting and flashes here and there that give the whole thing a haunted house feel. At the same time, the trapped with zomibes” motif is a familiar one, but the show uses the references to Dawn of the Dead and other way-paving predecessors to make the most of the Vulcan attack scenes. You know Archer and company are going to survive the encounter (the flash forward cold open ensures that), but it’s still tense seeing our quarter of characters have to navigate, think, and fight their way through this Vulcan horde.

While all of this is going on, the episode’s plot features Trip and Mayweather landing on a larger asteroid in a chaotic asteroid field, with the hope of mining some trellium. Story-wise, there’s not much to this one. The two of them have trouble just beaming the rocks onto the ship; they land on an asteroid; danger inevitably arises from the asteroid’s trajectory changing thanks to one of the Expanse’s trademark anomalies; and then they barely escape in time.

But the place this B-plot shines is in the effects department. Enterprise’s CGI has been hit or miss, but many of the space scenes have been particularly good this season. Watching the shuttle pods dodge and dive their way through the asteroid fields is a nice bit of excitement in an already heart-pumping episode. And seeing Trip and Mayweather’s shuttle narrowly get away as the asteroid crashes into one of its fellow giant space rocks is a visual thrill as well. As I said in a prior write up, even when the show hasn’t necessarily improved its writing, it’s picked up in terms of its visuals and raw excitement quotient, which is definitely worth something!

As tangential as the trellium mining operation feels, it actually contributes to the larger arc of the season. I’ve spent a lot of this first crop of episodes wondering why the Enterprise crew ahs been fine despite the clip Ambassador Soval showed in last season’s finale of Vulcans going crazy within the Expanse. It turns out that Vulcans are effectively allergic to trellium, with the ore containing a neurotoxin that reduces their neural synapses and reduces them to their more violent primitive state. Given its omnipresence in The Expanses, and its necessity to avoid the effects of the anomalies, it’s a nice way to account for why the vulcans have had such trouble in this region of space, and our heroes have been relatively fine by comparison.

We also get to see the effect the trellium has on T’Pol. With that, the episode picks up on one of the most prevalent zombie movie tropes, namely, the person in the survivor group who’s been infected but hasn’t fully succumbed yet. Watching T’Pol get more combative and paranoid not only gives us insight into the events that have transpired and afflicted the rest of the crew, but also give us another opportunity to have Jolene Blalock show her range. At the same time, it helps add even greater urgency to the escape part of the plot, since they have to get T’Pol to Phlox in time for her to treat her, before it becomes too late to reverse the effects.

Hell, there's even the horror movie trope of the last minute fake out, where T’Pol hallucinates a PTSD attack from the remaining ragified Vulcans, only to discover that it was all a dream. It’s a little cheesy, but still a well-done way for the show to earn its stripes in the horror department. The scary stuff, at least this sort of scary stuff, is not Star Trek*s typical M.O.. But it does appear to be something that *Enterprise excels at, giving us lots of action, lots of scares, and some nice world-building details along the way. If every episode in the Expanse were this good, I wouldn’t mind if the Enterprise stayed there forever, however scary the threats might be.