The Seventh

DVD, Enterprise S2 (The Seventh)

Not as strong an episode as I remembered, but it has its moments. It certainly has high production values (a sign they were blowing the budget too early in the season, or simply the improving general standards of TV?), with a nice snow-bound landing pad reminiscent of the one in 'Broken Bow'. The stylised yellow flashbacks were also extremely well done and the mystery added a different kind of slant to the episode, as did T'Pol's trust in and dependence on Archer, marking another step forward for their friendship. Travis Mayweather wasn't as well used, only there as a make-weight, his piloting skills not shown off and getting ordered around throughout. The other characters also suffered from the focus on T'Pol and Archer, the troubles Trip has as acting Captain not explored in great enough detail - it's set up to be quite a humourous B-story, but is over before it got anywhere, Trip easily able to convince the Vulcan Captain he was Archer. They should either have cut back on the humour completely and concentrated on ramping up the tension with T'Pol's repressed memories, or gone the whole hog and really put Trip through the wringer, for example if he had to pretend to be Captain with a visit from the Vulcans or to their ship.

There were plenty of aliens, a whole roomful of shady characters, a bit like the Cantina bar in 'Star Wars', but the place seemed very small, and the aliens didn't give the strangers any trouble or take much interest in them, so opportunity for more danger or difficulty was lost. The story itself had a bit of a 'so what?' element to it, as the descent of T'Pol into the memories doesn't go very far. Menos merely trots out the sympathetic family hologram, makes a plea for innocence and T'Pol develops a crisis of confidence in her judgement. This isn't very Vulcan-like behaviour (and don't get me started on how un-Vulcan-like Menos was - sure he's an undercover operative, but he must still repress his emotions?).

The V'Lara must be a potent ritual for T'Pol to be reacting so strongly against it. At first it seems to be a dark moment in Vulcan ways, covering up the retrieval of the agents, but it's dismissed by T'Pol, and Menos is shown to be guilty anyway, so there's no great moral quandary! T'Pol even hesitates to shoot the guy in the back, but he's only going to be stunned - I know it's about whether she can let him go or take him to the Vulcans where he'll be incarcerated, but you don't get much tension from holding up a safe weapon like a phaser. If she'd been forced to kill him or forced into a real moral quagmire then the episode could have gone somewhere, but it remains a 'close to good' type of show without making the most of what it had.

The aliens in the meeting hall were a bit useless, as the place gets set on fire (cleanly, too cleanly!) and they all hightail it out of there when all it needed was a couple of buckets of water! It can't help but feeling like an artificial stage when such things happen, the only 'real' people being Menos and his captors. If the aliens seen weren't up to much (except in the excellent makeup), there were plenty of pleasing references to peoples and places: the seventeen years younger T'Pol seen in flashback chases Menos on Risa, Andoria is mentioned, as are Tellarites, and we even get one of those fish-faced lumpy blokes commonly seen on 'DS9' (do they have a name?). I think there may have been other inconsistencies and lack of ambition for the story, but I still liked it in its way. A mystery thriller is shown to work with these characters, but next time it needs to be taken to a deeper level. Other minutiae: called 'The Seventh', this was also the seventh episode of the season; and Bruce Davison also appeared in 'Remember' a Season 3 episode of 'Voyager'.

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