The Forgotten

DVD, Enterprise S3 (The Forgotten)

It's bad, I know, but I had, ironically, forgotten what this episode was about. You could say it's a eulogy to all those redshirts that have been lost over the years, but more specifically it deals with the loss of crewmen from the Enterprise, and through it, Trip's grief over the death  of his sister is worked through after it had been bottled up and become anger for so long. The Engineer had almost forgotten that initial anger and hatred he displayed after the attack on Earth by the Xindi probe, and he'd come back to being that genial drawling tech-head the ship depended on week after week to keep it going. So the title speaks not only of those that died during the Enterprise's mission, but also of Trip's personal sidelining of his dealing with Elizabeth's death and becomes the central core of the episode.

It didn't start out seeming like it was going to be a Trip episode - following on directly from the last two stories (making this, I suppose, the series' first, but not last three-parter), where the NX-01 had made contact with Degra, Archer had explained the truth about the Xindi's position as pawns of a greater future power, and had received help and coordinates for a covert meeting with Degra and his ally, the Xindi-Sloth council member. So it's all about the ship's occupants being on edge, having survived a shattering confrontation with enemy Xindi, many casualties - the story could have veered off to become about the aftermath of T'Pol's addiction, her struggle to retain composure now that emotions are clouding in. It could have been about Reed who defies orders to finish his task (in a sequence reminiscent of the outer hull EVA in 'First Contact'), to put out a plasma fire (green, of course, though not quite as close as it was for Jake, O'Brien and Sisko in 'Civil Defence'!). It could even have been about Archer's determination to win Degra's trust and convince him of the veracity of his evidence.

All of these character pieces form a patchwork, rather like the damaged ship, different parts being dealt with, slowly coming together, everything under a volatile strain that could break at any moment. I even felt that the story was more filler than anything else until the differing parts came together to show that some good work was happening: a crew member who died that Trip has to write a letter about to her parents added to Reed's injury doing his duty with Trip on the hull, added to T'Pol advising how important emotional control is at a difficult time like this, added to Archer's careful and considered attempt to win Degra over, means Trip is the crucible of the story. When he accepts his sister's death and moves on, even though angry at the Captain's decision to treat with the enemy, he can finally write the letter he'd been putting off, and making one of the best closing scenes of the series.

There are other things to like about this beyond Trip, but he takes the meat of the story, a sounding board for what many of the crew must be going through. Archer's speech to the crew in the Shuttlepod launch bay (or a cargo bay), shows him in much better light than he has been lately, a more sober head that has seen the best way out of the conflict is to make peace. But the Reptilians aren't going to allow that, so it becomes a minor battle against one of their ships, with help from Degra gaining the victory and protecting what even Degra now calls the alliance. He's been won over, even allowing space for a mild joke about Archer taking his memory of their previous meeting in 'Stratagem'. This is possibly the best episode yet for Degra, who is fully sympathetic, even trying to get his associate to believe in Archer's story, and showing some small degree of remorse for the Xindi attack on Earth, and a definite desire, an eager wish for Archer to be able to persuade the council of the future he saw - a future in which the Xindi and humans are part of the greater alliance of the Federation. You don't really think of Season 3 as being part of the building blocks towards the Federation, but through this clever temporal knowledge of the future, it brings the organisation closer in a small way.

The season isn't firing on all cylinders, these episodes haven't been classics of the genre or even the best of the series, but they have brought in real damage to the ship and crew, taken time for a remembrance of those that have been lost, acknowledged the frailty of life, and moved at least two characters onward. Plus Dr. Phlox gets to pull rank on Trip, power to Trek doctors everywhere! I don't think Levar Burton's directing added much beyond telling the story, but they were doing the best with what they had available, after writing themselves into this corner and having to pull off a story that could progress over the course of so many episodes when there was really very little latitude to explore: they had to search for and get closer to finding the weapon, so how many ways can you do that without losing the urgency and immediacy of flying through hostile space? Importantly, the Enterprise's primary mission to explore strange new worlds and civilisations, is talked of hopefully by Degra, of all people, and heralded the time when the ship and its crew could return to that life and more optimistic goal again.

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