[7.4/10] It’s hard to know how much to separate season 3 of Star Trek: Enterprise from its post-9/11 allegory. Is this season about Archer and company trying to find the famed Weapons of Mass Destruction? Does it mean to flip the allegory on its head, and have the Xindi be the coalition of the willing, enacting the Bush Doctrine of a preemptive strike? Does it mean for the different species of Xindi who have, per this episode, been in a 100-year war with one another to stand in for different groups in the Middle East allying and warring with one another for long periods of time?
It’s hard to be sure as a viewer, and I’m not sure even the writers’ room, which presumably contains a diversity of views and perspectives on the subject, knows for sure. But with that uncertainty, it’s best to take the show as aiming for the usual sense of abstraction, and landing on the usual Star Trek maxims. One of those longstanding maxims is that, even on a show when entire species are given broad generalizations as characteristics, there is individuality, in terms of who people are and what their values are, to the point that you can’t paint them all with a broad brush.
That’s certainly true for Gralik, the ape-like Xindi in charge of the colony that the creepy telepath from the last episode pointed the Enterprise toward. Gralik is the head of a type of refining facility, which produced the substance that, unbeknownst to him, was used to help build the Xindi’s superweapon that killed 7 million people on Earth. The substance has many uses, and so despite a fairly rough interrogation from Archer, Gralik is aghast to find out that his life’s work, the product of this facility that he takes such pride in, is using to decimate a species he’s never even heard of.
Guest star Jonathan Cothran, who plays Gralik, sells the weight of that realization. As the script makes painfully clear, the theme of this episode is trust. Gralik has to trust that Archer and company are telling the truth about their loss and their people, and Archer has to trust that Gralik is being truthful about his ignorance as to what the subtance was being used for. Part of the latter from of trust comes from Gralik’s admission that he might have been wilfully blind in the name of the wealth he would receive for refining that much of the substance with that much purity. There is a humility there that Archer can recognize, which makes the ape-like Xinid seem more human.
But much of what persuades Archer, and what persuades the audience, that Gralik is on the up and up is the conviction and sincerity with which Cothran delivers his assurances and self-condemnations. It’s a stellar guest performance, one where you can hear the passion in Gralik’s voice when he tells Archer of his horror at something he created being used as such a tool for destruction. Much of this excursion, and this episode in particular but also for the reason as a whole, seems to be an effort to realize that the Xindi are not monolithic and some of them at least, are not unlike us. Beyond the choices Gralik makes to help our heroes, Cothran’s performance makes that case intuitively in his presence and speech, in a way that the audience instinctively understands.
But it can’t be all grand cultural empathy and noteworthy guest star performances. In what has apparently become a standard practice for Enterprise this season, we also have to have the world-building B-story. In this instance, it’s Trip, Phlox, and T’Pol analyzing the Xindi weapon that the crew recovered and were instructed to examine a couple of episodes ago. Like the others we’ve had so far, it’s pleasant enough, if not exactly world-shattering.
Trip discovers that the weapon is regulated with some sort of little synaptic worm that can regenerate itself inside the gun. Phlox discovers that the worms can be neutralized with delta radiation. And when Trip tries to test the weapon, it enters self-destruct mode and has to be rush-beamed outside the ship to keep everyone safe. All of this is fine, if not necessarily super engaging material. But I suppose there’s worse ways to deliver this information than by giving us these little unobtrusive vignettes within larger stories rather than trying to cram in some sort of message about how “in a weird way, we’re all like the worms in the gun, if you really think about it, man.”
But there’s world-building in the portions of the episode down on the colony planet as well. Gralik explains that their used to be six species of Xindi, but at the end of the 100 year war of the peoples, the Reptilians and the Insectoids chose to blow up the planet to...I don’t know...teach the others a lesson or something? And the bird-Xindi all died in the process.
It’s supposed to represent the senselessness and “cut off your nose to spite your face” sense from the Xindi’s internecine fights. But it seems also to suggest that we’re supposed to accept that the Reptilian Xindi and the bug Xindi are the evil ones, and that the others can be redeemed, which hey, is still kind of reductive, but it at least shows Archer moderating his stance from “all Xindi are responsible for the deaths of my people” to “not all people, and maybe not all Xindi species, share equal blame for what happened on Earth.”
It’s a somewhat trite lesson, but still a worthwhile one, about trying to understand the people on the other side of the conflict with the complexity and nuance they’re owed rather than sweeping them all into the same category of deserving our vengeance. That’s reinforced when Gralik puts his own life at risk in helping Archer and his crew avoid the evil Xindi and even track them, and in return, Archer chooses not to blow up Gralik’s facility, despite the concerns and objections of Reed and Major Hayes.
It feels like Enterprise wants to make some bold statement here. That’s the tricky thing about the allegory of this season. On the one hand, this episode feels like a not so subtle critique of the perspectives baked into the then-contemporary War on Terror, or maybe even a reference to Gralik as an Oskar Schindler-type figure. Or maybe it’s just the usual Star Trek “learn to see more than your first angry impression of an individual and of a people”-type moral. Either way, a great guest performance cements it as a nice outing from the show, however far-reaching or abstracted its grand statements are meant to be.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-07-23T04:15:42Z
[7.4/10] It’s hard to know how much to separate season 3 of Star Trek: Enterprise from its post-9/11 allegory. Is this season about Archer and company trying to find the famed Weapons of Mass Destruction? Does it mean to flip the allegory on its head, and have the Xindi be the coalition of the willing, enacting the Bush Doctrine of a preemptive strike? Does it mean for the different species of Xindi who have, per this episode, been in a 100-year war with one another to stand in for different groups in the Middle East allying and warring with one another for long periods of time?
It’s hard to be sure as a viewer, and I’m not sure even the writers’ room, which presumably contains a diversity of views and perspectives on the subject, knows for sure. But with that uncertainty, it’s best to take the show as aiming for the usual sense of abstraction, and landing on the usual Star Trek maxims. One of those longstanding maxims is that, even on a show when entire species are given broad generalizations as characteristics, there is individuality, in terms of who people are and what their values are, to the point that you can’t paint them all with a broad brush.
That’s certainly true for Gralik, the ape-like Xindi in charge of the colony that the creepy telepath from the last episode pointed the Enterprise toward. Gralik is the head of a type of refining facility, which produced the substance that, unbeknownst to him, was used to help build the Xindi’s superweapon that killed 7 million people on Earth. The substance has many uses, and so despite a fairly rough interrogation from Archer, Gralik is aghast to find out that his life’s work, the product of this facility that he takes such pride in, is using to decimate a species he’s never even heard of.
Guest star Jonathan Cothran, who plays Gralik, sells the weight of that realization. As the script makes painfully clear, the theme of this episode is trust. Gralik has to trust that Archer and company are telling the truth about their loss and their people, and Archer has to trust that Gralik is being truthful about his ignorance as to what the subtance was being used for. Part of the latter from of trust comes from Gralik’s admission that he might have been wilfully blind in the name of the wealth he would receive for refining that much of the substance with that much purity. There is a humility there that Archer can recognize, which makes the ape-like Xinid seem more human.
But much of what persuades Archer, and what persuades the audience, that Gralik is on the up and up is the conviction and sincerity with which Cothran delivers his assurances and self-condemnations. It’s a stellar guest performance, one where you can hear the passion in Gralik’s voice when he tells Archer of his horror at something he created being used as such a tool for destruction. Much of this excursion, and this episode in particular but also for the reason as a whole, seems to be an effort to realize that the Xindi are not monolithic and some of them at least, are not unlike us. Beyond the choices Gralik makes to help our heroes, Cothran’s performance makes that case intuitively in his presence and speech, in a way that the audience instinctively understands.
But it can’t be all grand cultural empathy and noteworthy guest star performances. In what has apparently become a standard practice for Enterprise this season, we also have to have the world-building B-story. In this instance, it’s Trip, Phlox, and T’Pol analyzing the Xindi weapon that the crew recovered and were instructed to examine a couple of episodes ago. Like the others we’ve had so far, it’s pleasant enough, if not exactly world-shattering.
Trip discovers that the weapon is regulated with some sort of little synaptic worm that can regenerate itself inside the gun. Phlox discovers that the worms can be neutralized with delta radiation. And when Trip tries to test the weapon, it enters self-destruct mode and has to be rush-beamed outside the ship to keep everyone safe. All of this is fine, if not necessarily super engaging material. But I suppose there’s worse ways to deliver this information than by giving us these little unobtrusive vignettes within larger stories rather than trying to cram in some sort of message about how “in a weird way, we’re all like the worms in the gun, if you really think about it, man.”
But there’s world-building in the portions of the episode down on the colony planet as well. Gralik explains that their used to be six species of Xindi, but at the end of the 100 year war of the peoples, the Reptilians and the Insectoids chose to blow up the planet to...I don’t know...teach the others a lesson or something? And the bird-Xindi all died in the process.
It’s supposed to represent the senselessness and “cut off your nose to spite your face” sense from the Xindi’s internecine fights. But it seems also to suggest that we’re supposed to accept that the Reptilian Xindi and the bug Xindi are the evil ones, and that the others can be redeemed, which hey, is still kind of reductive, but it at least shows Archer moderating his stance from “all Xindi are responsible for the deaths of my people” to “not all people, and maybe not all Xindi species, share equal blame for what happened on Earth.”
It’s a somewhat trite lesson, but still a worthwhile one, about trying to understand the people on the other side of the conflict with the complexity and nuance they’re owed rather than sweeping them all into the same category of deserving our vengeance. That’s reinforced when Gralik puts his own life at risk in helping Archer and his crew avoid the evil Xindi and even track them, and in return, Archer chooses not to blow up Gralik’s facility, despite the concerns and objections of Reed and Major Hayes.
It feels like Enterprise wants to make some bold statement here. That’s the tricky thing about the allegory of this season. On the one hand, this episode feels like a not so subtle critique of the perspectives baked into the then-contemporary War on Terror, or maybe even a reference to Gralik as an Oskar Schindler-type figure. Or maybe it’s just the usual Star Trek “learn to see more than your first angry impression of an individual and of a people”-type moral. Either way, a great guest performance cements it as a nice outing from the show, however far-reaching or abstracted its grand statements are meant to be.