4x21 Terra Prime (2)

[9.2/10] When I think about the overall arc of Enterprise, it’s one of prejudice and resentment blossoming into understanding and attachment. It didn’t really click for me until Trip tried to talk to his captor, asking if he’d ever talked to one, spent time with one, basically giving him the “I was once like you” speech. There’s an irony, albeit a poignant one then, that the young man who was once ready to kill T’Pol in his spore-addled suspicions and delirium early in the show, is now the one risking his life to save her and their child.

To put mildly and cheesily, it’s been a long (and rocky) road getting from there to here, but “Terra Prime” honors that journey. Given that former showrunners Brannon & Braga return to write the show’s final episode, this feels like Manny Cotto and company’s take on a series finale, and it has the rhythms of one. There is a climactic battle, a series of reflections on where this group is after so many adventures together, and a challenge that seems to be the thematic bookend to where they began.

That challenge is to take down a man, and a group, who aim to destroy all the expanded horizons and interstellar cooperation that the crew of the Enterprise has established over the last four years. In that, Paxton is most compelling villain our heroes have ever faced (depending on how you want to think of Soong).

He has Peter Weller’s droning conviction, a sort of true belief and clear motivation and acceptance of costs and hypocrisies as part of a misguided greater good in every line he utters. He has the undercutting secret that T’Pol exposes -- a genetic abnormality that would have made his idol, Col. Green, euthanize him, and which he can only treat due to cultural exchange with the Rigellians. And he has a philosophy -- of isolationism, of xenophobia, of self-interest over altruism -- that runs counter to everything that Starfleet stands for.

Oh yeah, and he has a giant frickin’ laser pointed at Starfleet headquarters. Beyond the moral challenge that “Terra Prime” lays at our heroes’ feet, it also gives them a challenge with the potential for daring shuttlepod landings and phaser fire exchanges and low oxygen fistfights. For as much as Paxton feels like Enterprise’s “final boss” on a thematic level, the show finds a way to make the infiltration of his base and takedown of his weapon exciting on its own terms.

Part of what makes this episode feel like a series finale is that it finds ways to give everyone a moment, give them something to do, in accomplishing that takedown. Reed gets to ply his old Section 31 boss again for the info on how to break in to the Mars facility. Mayweather gets to show his flying chops once more and pull off the “sneak behind a comet” plan despite having to go manual and evade sabotage. Hoshi gets to hold firm as commander of the Enterprise despite pressure from Earth’s Prime Minister to just blow Paxton’s facility up (and her friends with it). T’Pol gets to...well...mostly hold her baby and cry, which isn’t ideal, but she also exposes Paxton’s hypocrisy, which is something.

Naturally, though, it ends up coming down to a physical struggle between Archer and Paxton. But there’s a few things to like about it. For one, the show’s action game is on point, from the shuttlepod near-crash landing that gets them in the door, to the phaser fire exchanges that set the stakes, to the exposed atmosphere environment that makes the fisticuffs more than just the usual punching and kicking. For another, Archer essentially loses! The twist with Paxton being adapted to the low oxygen is a cool one. And the fact that despite failing to stop the countdown, Archer bought Trip enough time to redirect the laser is an even better one. While not flawless, the action beats here are really good and befitting of a final challenge for our heroes.

Of course, not everything in the episode is great. For one thing, the answer to the big mystery of how Trip and T’Pol turns out to be...that Enterprise has genetic samples for all its crewmembers and Terra Prime stole it and used it to clone a baby. Okay then? We’ve never heard anything about these samples before, or had any hint that this was possible, so it just feels out of nowhere.

It ties into the other unsatisfying reveal in this episode -- that there’s a mole on Enterprise who’s been working with Terra Prime and is also apparently responsible for stealing the samples. As soon as Gannet mentioned that, I assumed it was Kolby. It plainly wasn’t going to be one of the main crew; he was the only other named character on the ship, and he had motivation to defame Trip given the situation. Sure, it was a little obvious, but at least the steps were there. Instead, Kolby is a red herring, and it’s just some ensign we’ve never heard of, which gives the reveal all the momentousness and shock of a fart in an elevator.

What’s more, for however much I enjoy the thematic symmetry of this group of people who mistrusted Vulcans being the one fighting so hard to let them stay and work with humanity, I definitely didn’t enjoy the fact that the conceptual punctuation mark on that notion is delivered via yet another Archer speech. His (and by extension the writers’) thoughts are not bad, tying the coming together of a crew with the coming together of an interstellar community in a nice way. But there’s something that feels so perfunctory and expected about Archer’s big monologue saving the conference as the music swells and bland platitudes about togetherness are spouted.

Still, much of it comes down to performance, which is what saves the rest of the episode and gives it the emotional punch that that scene lacks. Phlox has the least to do in the rescue mission, and is given the hoariest idea in television to express in his big scene -- that his coworkers have become his family. And yet, John Billingsley just nails the scene, proving himself once again the finest actor on the show. His reflections on thinking the Enterprise would be a respite from Denobulan familial tangles, his expression of grief for a child whose death he feels as though it were his own, his visibly breaking down at the thought of how much they have all been through and the emotional costs of it, is just tremendous.

The same goes for the ensuing scenes with Trip and T’Pol. There is a Deadwood quality to these moments, where two people who care for one another, but who have been at a distance for understandable reasons, come together in offering solace to one another in the face of an unimaginable loss. Naming the child “Elizabeth” after Trip’s sister adds a particular resonance to these scenes, and the simple act of the two of them holding hands adds an emotional warmth to an otherwise devastating set of scenes.

It is a personal connection, like the many forged upon the Enterprise, that “Terra Prime”, Manny Cotto, and his team mean to celebrate here. It’s a connection, a development, that they didn’t expect back when Archer and humanity as a whole resented the Vulcan High Council, and when Trip saw T’Pol as a strange interloper. And yet over the course of four years, Starfleet found itself part of a broader community, Archer and Ambassador Soval earned one another’s respect, and T’Pol and Trip discovered that the ties between a human and Vulcan could be deeper and more meaningful than anyone would have guessed.

Whatever comes next in Enterprise’s much-maligned finale, “Terra Prime” delivers a fitting ending to the series, that puts a capstone on so many ideas, so many characters and relationships, that marks the distance between where things started and where they are now.