Twilight

DVD, Enterprise S3 (Twilight)

Let's see, T'Pol gets promoted to Captain, Trip gets promoted to Captain, Reed… gets a Mirror Universe-style cool beard (and gets promoted to Captain), and Travis… Travis gets killed before he can utter a single line. Now if I didn't know better I'd think this was a cruel running joke in the vein of Harry Kim and his unfortunate choices of romance, but it would be ridiculous to have the joke that a main cast member (on a main cast member's salary) should almost never get anything to say or do, and get killed at every opportunity! Which means it was an oversight by the writers. Which means they didn't care enough about Travis Mayweather as a character. To be fair, Hoshi gets about the same quotient of airtime (apart from the recent 'Exile'), so it's not like they were being mean to Travis. But really, you'd think they'd find a way to include him in such an outside the box episode. It once again glaringly points to the fact that on this series people had their defined roles and rarely moved beyond them, which may have been why it was a relatively short-lived branch of the 'Star Trek' mythos.

This particular leaf of the branch (to extend the analogy), has a great deal to do with the wider tree of Trek, taking as it does, a great staple of the genre and the series' and working it surprisingly into the season of the arc rather than its more likely place in the midst of other standalone stories. It's a tribute to the writers that they thought up a way to get out beyond the bounds of the season's plot, while not leaving it behind entirely. It actually is one of the closest and most robust reminders of the delicacy of their quest, thanks to the ramming home of the implications of the Xindi and their genocidal plans by showing the Earth's destruction and the aftermath of the last vestiges of humanity's attempt at survival. Yet it also feels like something fan-written, which never touches the issues as strongly as a 'genuine' episode of other Trek series', like 'The Inner Light' or 'The Visitor'.

Though never fair to compare 'Enterprise' episodes with ones from the golden years of the early-to-mid-to-late-90s, there has always been an aura of classic around this story, and watching it again I confess I felt the same way as when I saw the original broadcast. That is, a vague, ever so slightly nagging sense of disappointment. By the series and the season's standards it's undeniably a good episode, and has mystery, action and intrigue along with many pleasing references from Trek continuity, yet it also remains a grab bag, an assortment of set pieces rather than a rounded story. There are many things I like about it, and many that work, but for me it never reaches the almost-intangible status of Classic that I had expectations for, and falling under the same problems the series has always had: that of character development, keeping to established lore, and doing something new.

It comes closest to doing something new, I'll give it that, but is it even possible to do a truly new episode of Trek? It's very difficult to do one completely unlike any before it, hence the comparisons mentioned earlier. For the series it's quite different to their usual style, but that's absolutely a good thing and enabled them to bring in familiarity that had been lost to a certain extent by their mission to the Expanse. So it's a novel way of bringing Soval back to the series, and surprising Admiral Forrest wasn't utilised in the same way, or Shran, though they both are mentioned. Watching it again after having seen the finale of the series it strikes me that that followed a similar path to this postulation. Shran's a general, T'Pol and Archer are closer than they used to be, a main character has died, and there's a sense of time having passed and what Starfleet and Earth had been was changed. Obviously in 'These Are The Voyages…' Earth hadn't been destroyed, so the timelines differed, but the impression of the ongoing nature of their lives was similar.

The story can't be faulted for its action, but maybe it was at the expense of something deeper? Maybe the unfolded and unfolding lives of the characters in this new universe where humans are an endangered species weren't explored enough? And the NX-01 gets boarded yet again. But it's still a tense moment, even though the Xindi weapons still sound a bit weak. There's a good fight in Archer's quarters in which his figure of Zefram Cochrane gets good use, and the Xindi-Reptilians continue to be dangerous, tough opponents that stalk with purpose the halls of humanity to eradicate their bitter foe. They aren't the Borg, but if only a little more work had been done they might have been spoken of in the same sentence. A race that would never be spoken of even on the same page, would be the Yridians, the famed information brokers of 'TNG' and 'DS9', and I wouldn't have expected to ever see one on 'Enterprise', yet there he stands! Not that I'd given it much thought: "I know what this series needs - more Yridians!" I always love it when they bring in a 'future' race, and it never bothers me in the way it does some people, because unless we've had confirmed date of first contact, who knows when it happened? And even then there are plenty of opportunities to run into aliens of unknown race and origin, as happened with the Ferengi.

They didn't appear to have made any changes to the Yridian design at all, which is fair enough, since they didn't change the Vulcans, Romulans, Ferengi, Klingons, Nausicaans or Borg either. It seems they only wanted to redesign aliens that hadn't been done properly since 'TOS', such as Tellarites, Gorn, Tholians, Orions or Andorians, which again, is fair enough, but an observation worth pointing out. The makeup as a whole… well, I'm not sure. I have to give them leeway for old-age makeup because it was only a decade into the future, but I sometimes wish a bit more had been done. It's relatively simple to do very old age: less hair, more wrinkles and people bending over, creaking about. But a decade older isn't easy to predict. Trip and Reed should have had different hairstyles and maybe less of their hair. They both seemed to talk a bit slower as if they were unsure of how to act ten years older. So it was a little disconcerting. Archer didn't really act any older because he didn't feel it, and the grey hair was all he needed to sell it, T'Pol untouched by a mere ten years, but I did like the work done on Phlox to make his skin mottled and hair longer.

If the makeup effects were mostly strong, the computer effects were stronger, with some good little battle scenes, and best of all, actual battle damage to the NX-01. The explosion of the Xindi ship being thumped into its twin while attached to the Enterprise didn't have enough weight, but that's an age-old problem, and there were some dynamic swooping shots that almost brought to mind the great ship battles of 'DS9'. Almost… I loved seeing new Starfleet ships, such as the Intrepid with it's different hull configuration, though I wasn't sure how after Earth, Starfleet and all starship plans had been destroyed, that the ship-building program could continue unabated. The destruction of Earth was very good for a TV budget, starting the episode with a literal bang, and showing us what we were unlikely ever to see in the true timeline. I wonder if this was an episode watched by JJ Abrams' team for inspiration because it's all about a race wanting to annihilate another race in revenge for future grief caused, the homeworld is taken out by a special weapon and the remaining members of that race are a scattered people. Nero, Vulcans, etc?

It always gets on my nerves, but I'll say it again: I despise the way Vulcans are portrayed on 'Enterprise'. This time, although T'Pol is generally the best of a bad bunch, she shows pain and anguish when the bulkhead falls on her leg, and later, she and Soval have their usual slightly emotional, yet mildly restrained chat in which they just about get angry or disappointed or defensive, then pull it back like a yo-yo! Granted, Vulcans experience pain, but Tuvok used to grit his teeth, his emotional control of more import to him than acknowledging the pain, and in fact it probably helped him focus. Niggling, I know, but 'Enterprise' has a lot to answer for as a precedent for the new, emotion-loving style of Vulcans in 21st Century Treks.

Other little things to notice and enjoy are the 'Star Trek II' references: Ceti Alpha V, the last human colony is the same location Khan was dumped on; the Mutara sector is presumably where the Mutara Nebula is, and there's the old-fashioned piping Archer on board when he visits. T'Pol worked really well as a Captain in uniform and they should have kept her in it; this is one of the only times, and maybe the first, where we see the crawlways of the NX-01 when Archer and T'Pol have to get to the bridge while the Turbolifts are down. I suppose it's one of those miraculous Starfleet technology anomalies that a ship can lose its entire bridge (a spectacular sequence, though I wanted to see the inside, like in 'Nemesis' - and there's not often you can say that film did something better than anything else in Trek!), yet the monitors still work on the rest of the ship.

I'm not sure if 'The Matrix Revolutions' had come out, but 'Reloaded' would have by the time this episode was scored, and there's some music towards the end of the episode that is remarkably reminiscent of the 'approaching Zion'-type music of those films, so I wonder if it was an inspiration or complete coincidence since films and episode would have been out in the same year. Robbie Duncan McNeill probably pulls off one of his best efforts on the series as Director, and we even get to see what every Trek series has to do at some point (sometimes more than once!): destroy the main ship. It has to happen, and it happened good. The only thing is that Archer dying rather than being cured loses the episode any of its potential tension because no matter what had happened history would have righted itself. Archer would have died eventually, whether naturally or not. Phlox has a more dramatic death than him, but the real problem lies in there being nothing to be learned from the episode for the characters. They never knew what happened, there's not even a deft sleight of mind (as happened to Kes in 'Time and Again' when events don't occur as she'd foreseen and her mind is put at rest). So it's a nothing ending, and though it does have moments where you care about the characters and feel something other than excitement (rare on this series), it's nothing more than a view into a potential future that will not now come about. I liked it a lot, but it didn't hit enough highs to make it a classic.

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