Stratagem

DVD, Enterprise S3 (Stratagem)

'Enterprise' meets 'Mission: Impossible' in a bottle show extraordinaire! I'm building this up a little too much, it was no 'Shuttlepod One' or 'Hard Time' or any of the other episodes in which two characters are thrown together in either real or faked circumstances, and it wasn't the episode you'd use to introduce someone to the series. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened when I first saw this episode - I didn't want to miss it, though my cousin was staying, so we both watched it, and it probably put him off, if not Trek in general, then certainly 'Enterprise,' for life! It didn't help my appreciation for it either, as I was seeing it through his eyes, so the wonder at what's going on that should have been there at the beginning, with Archer and Degra on an alien shuttle under attack, and a story about three years passing, with the war over, paled a little. My cousin may well have assumed this was a direct continuation of a serialised story to which he wasn't privy, and that's how it appears unless you know the sequence of events and understand that this is as confusing to a regular viewer as a fresh one.

When you know what's going on the episode doesn't lose the limited charm it had before, but you find yourself waiting for something to happen. A story in which two people are confined in close quarters can be superb or merely mundane, depending on the writing and the mental stakes. Trouble is, the atmosphere never rose to a fever pitch, just degenerated into the pair shouting through the noise of a simulated attack or encounter with an anomaly. Degra isn't the most sympathetic or developed Trek character out there, and though I've nothing against Randy Oglesby, the person he's playing comes across as an uptight man in whom we don't see much beneath the surface, not a fascinating character study of a scientist bent on genocide. Can't help it, sorry, but I have to say that the 'DS9' writers could have made this something special.

The story does warm up and get going once the plan begins to go wrong, it's just such a shame the desperate straits of holding it together is only a momentary segment, then it all has to end. I wanted Archer to wrestle the knife away from Degra and keep up the charade, keep trying to convince him, keep plugging away with any facts Hoshi could dig up. There would have been added tension as we try to decide if Degra had bought into the setup fully or continues to harbour doubts, and as for trying the process again, I would have been happy to see that tried. It's a terribly morally ambiguous thing to do, deleting someone's recent memory, in fact, not ambiguous, just plain evil, when you think about it, but I can understand the reasoning, that this was their only way to access Degra's mind, but it might have been possible to do one of those trips into it as O'Brien and Bashir did to Sloan, or the nightmarish fantasy world of the clown in 'The Thaw.' Then it could have been much more fantastical and worrying, instead of everything being under control, except for the debris field interfering with the elaborate system.

I'm not going to berate the series for trying something different, and something that suited the bare bones approach to technology of this prequel - later series' would have pulled this off in a Holodeck, so there's something appealing that the NX-01 crew are relying on flat screens and hydraulics, as well as their captain's acting ability, to succeed. The episode was a direct sequel to 'Proving Ground,' something that hasn't been as common in this so-called serialised season as might have been anticipated. Perhaps watching the two together as a feature-length episode might have made it more acceptable, but even though the episodes are strongly connected by place, the two are fairly distinct entities. After recently viewing 'Apocalypse Rising' in which Sisko and his crew try to fool a party full of Klingons and have to be drugged with anti-intoxicants to prevent them getting drunk from the bloodwine, it's fun to hear Archer doing the same thing in his charade. Bits of information that were useful included the MACO's sub-dermal transceivers, which they use to communicate. And the double fake of pretending the NX-01 had made the Xindi technology work and got them to Azati Prime quickly, in order to fool Degra into confirming it as the site of the weapon, improved the episode.

They were on a tight time limit, saying that another Xindi ship was a few hours away, and might detect them with its superior sensors, but if they could detect the Xindi, surely the Xindi could detect them. Unless they were using the debris field as a shield, in which case how could they use their sensors, wouldn't the debris foul them up too? Maybe it was like a needle in a haystack, they were on the alert, and the Xindi weren't on the lookout for them. Or maybe the Xindi did detect them and couldn't arrive any quicker? The scene with the bloodworm was quite gory for a Trek episode, Archer having to cut open Degra's wrist to extract the creature, but it did look very real, I'll give them that.

All in all, the important thing was to get the necessary information that Azati Prime was the place to go, and they did that. But instead of turning out a deeper story, that's as far as it goes. We don't learn anything new about the characters, main or recurring. We don't get any closer to an understanding between Archer and his nemesis like he did with the Xindi-Primate, Gralik. And we don't do anything special, except for some mechanics that wouldn't have been tried in that form on other Treks. You have to look hard at some of these Season 3 episodes and admit that some of them were fillers - it wasn't as bad as Season 2, with no direction, but even with a clear progression they weren't always hitting the mark, so the experiment of an ongoing story both energised and detracted in equal measure, this one not working on anything more than a basic level, and consequently encouraging very little to think, or write, about.

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