3x06 Exile

[7.5/10] I think my theme for season 3 of Enterprise is going to be “I’m not sure I would ask for this from Star Trek, but I like it!” To that end, who would have expected this show to do a sort of sideways adaptation of Beauty and the Beast? And yet, by giving Hoshi a little more of the spotlight, introducing some characteristically science fiction-y wrinkles, and even injecting some more salient social commentary into the mix, Enterprise manages to put together an episode that tells a different sort of story in a very Star Trek way.

But in another way, this feels of a piece with Enterprise’s other efforts to take its cues from The Original Series. “Exile” has a fair amount in common with “Requiem For Methuselah”, an episode from TOS’s 3rd season. The two episodes share the sense of a world-weary ancient person struggling with loneliness, and that pathos being mixed with horror as he tries to override someone’s agency and autonomy in the process. There’s even the same sense of someone being trapped, and using our heroes passing by his neck of the woods to suit his own ends.

That’s the best feat “Exile” pulls off -- it makes Tarquin chilling but comprehensible. He is chilling because as with the Beast, there is this same sense of capture and grooming and manipulation going on. Tarquin is clearly enamored, or at least fascinated, with Hoshi, but the sense in which those feelings take shape is one of not recognizing her as a person. At almost all times, Tarquin lets his will override hers, with him constantly cajoling or nudging her, rather than listening to her, that makes the dynamic an uncomfortable one even when he’s trying to be nice.

His creepiness is magnified beyond The Beast’s or Flint’s though, because Tarquin also has the air of a stalker. That concept is explored in a true-to-form, science fiction-y fashion, with Tarquin having powers of telepathy that only Hoshi is capable of receiving, the but the effect is the same. Tarquin knows Hoshi’s favorite foods, the character of her interactions with her family, her feelings of connection or isolation from her friends and crewmates. The very fact of him knowing these things feels like a violation. But he goes beyond that even, weaponizing this information and trying to use it to sway Hoshi to stay with him, the preascient sense of someone cyberstalking a date to try to craft the perfect allure.

While all of this cerebral stalker business is going on, we get a B-story that doesn't have much juice to it beyond some solid effects work and spoon-feeding of the season arc. T’Pol has a theory that the anomalies the ship keeps running into are the result of a second giant metal sphere like the one the crew discovered in “Anomaly.” So Archer and Trip take a shuttle pod to go investigate the location where T’Pol suspects the second sphere will be, and sure enough there it is!

There’s not much to this, without a real arc Archer or Trip, and barely any bumps in the road from a plot perspective beyond the usual turbulence. The point of the episode seems to be two-fold. First, it gives the audience a runaway (er, driftaway) shuttle pod that Trip and Archer have to shoot down and avoid being run over by. That’s depicted with some fairly weak green screen effects and some not great up close early 2000s CGI, but the blocking and staging for the sequence is good at least.

Second, it lets the viewers know that, dun dun dun, there’s over fifty such spheres out in the expanse, and maybe they were deliberately constructed so as to make the expanse! I’m not sure why this is meant to be so important, beyond establishing that the anomaly problem is not one that can be solved easily given the troubles with both synthesizing trellium and plotting where the anomalies are likely to be. But in either case, the B-story gives us a little more worldbuilding and a little more action.

What’s noteworthy, however, is that while no one would call Hoshi’s encounter with Tarquin action-packed, it includes some really well-done blocking, framing, and editing itself. Particularly when Hoshi is experiencing the alien’s telepathic entreaties for the first time, director Roxann Dawson (of B’elanna Torres fame) uses a number of neat and different sorts of perspective shots to communicate both Hoshi’s sense of paranoia, and the quiet sense of things being amiss. But even when not going that flashy, the simply choice to shoot Hoshi through the lattice work between her and Tarquin plays with the shadow and light of the set, and helps convey her unspoken imprisonment there in a subtle, visual way.

And yet, “Exile” has a quiet sympathy for Hoshi’s captor here, without excusing him. The episode lays on the creep quotient and the fear factor, especially as Tarquin uses more and more elaborate ways to manipulate and try to trick Hoshi. Still, it treats these actions as the product of a fundamental loneliness, built on the back of an impossible long life and a yearning for things he once had. It’s a loneliness that he recognizes in Hoshi, and the episode strikes the right balance of implicitly condemning the character’s actions while probing his motivations here.

It also does well to show Hoshi as unnerved, but stoic, and ultimately resourceful. The episode is thankfully short on speeches about agency and self-determination. But it does have Hoshi state the obvious that it’s unreasonable for Tarquin to ask her to stay after knowing him for less than two days, and nicely sets up her standoff with him over his precious family heirloom that lets him connect to the outside world. It plays with both that sense of loneliness juxtaposed with a person’s right to direct their own life, in a way that makes a statement better than any of Star Trek’s usual grand declarations could.

It’s a more deft presentation of shades of gray than anything else Enterprise has presented in this new “darker” take on the original premise this season. As Archer’s cheesy “I can’t save humanity if I forget what makes us human” line is meant to suggest, season 3 is supposed to be about testing Starfleet’s values in the midst of a revenge quest and a locale that may not have room for them. But by drifting away from that overarching plot and theme, “Exile” ends up telling a better story about where understandable motivations run aground on bad actions, in a guise we might never have expected.