Day 337: Enterprise, Hatchery

Show: Star Trek; Enterprise

Episode Particulars: S3EP17, “Hatchery”

 Summary: As the Enterprise continues to make their way to Azati Prime (I know it seems like they’ve been doing this for ages, but when you think about it, they said in “Stratagem” that it would take three weeks, and since Enterprise aired once a week, it winds up being a bit meta), they come across a crashed Xindi ship. Since there are no lifesigns, an away team goes down to investigate. It turns out to be one piloted by the insectoid species of Xindi, and one of the rooms in the ship is filled with egg sacs, obviously serving as a sort of nursery. Archer decides they should try to restore enough power to keep the babies alive until they hatch, thinking it will prove they’re not the monsters the Xindi think they are. It’s a nice idea, but Archer seems far too invested in the plan, to the point where he seems to have forgotten why they’re in the Expanse in the first place. Of course, the fact that one of the sacs hit him with some sort of fluid might have something to do with that…

Standalone Thoughts: I’ll start by saying that I do like a lot of this episode, which I’ll go into more detail about shortly. However, two things about it really bug me, and I think those things lessened my enjoyment somewhat. First, there’s the actions of the away team. They get into the hatchery room, where the atmosphere suddenly becomes breathable for some reason, and they…take off their helmets. I don’t care what the tricorders say; you’re on an enemy ship, and you should be on your guard. What makes this worse is that the exact same thing happened in “The Crossing”, but the away team (which contained three of the same people that are on this mission) wisely kept their helmets on. It very quickly becomes obvious that the helmets had to come off so the plot could progress, and that sort of “plot before logic” (and established continuity) gets under my skin.

My other problem is somewhat related, in that nobody seems to draw a connection between Archer’s behavior and the fact that he got sprayed in the face. The audience knows that’s a bad sign the moment it happens, but as he gets more and more obsessed with the hatchery, everybody on the ship just looks at him funny and wonders what’s going on with him. Yes, it’s true in theory that the audience is more trope savvy than the characters, but a) thanks to the ship’s movie night, it seems likely that some of the crew would also be familiar with how things like this tend to play out, b) I would have thought one rule a group going into space would have would be “if you get covered in alien guck, you and your crew should be on alert for anything going wrong”, and c) the two people who were fully aware of what happened to Archer, Phlox and T’Pol, are also the two people who should immediately have put the pieces together. But it doesn’t come up again until the very end of the episode, and for some reason, that just broke my suspension of disbelief. A lot of the episode could have played out the same way if they’d had T’Pol or Phlox voice their suspicions about what’s going on, so I feel like the script was being deliberately obtuse. And that’s never fun.

If you can get past those aspects, though, there’s a lot of good material. The arguments Archer initially makes to save the hatchery make sense, and if it hadn’t been so obvious what the cause behind it was, his slide from reasonable to irrational would have been a great development. The crew being in conflict with their captain is a theme we haven’t really explored in Enterprise, so it’s interesting to see it play out, especially with the tensions already somewhat high thanks to their mission. The climax is overall pretty good, though the coda resolves things a little too neatly. And while I’m biased in this area, I like the interactions that we see between Malcolm and Hayes. The fight they had in “Harbinger” apparently got a lot out of their system, because while they (or at least Malcolm) are still prickly around each other, they’re both willing to listen to the other’s perspective and will, in roundabout ways, admit to being wrong. Even if the buildup to “Harbinger” was practically non-existent, the writers did a good job on following up on it, which I’m very glad to see.

I think I’d rank this episode higher than “Doctor’s Orders”, but it’s still somewhere in the middle of the pack, thanks to the problems I mentioned. Compared to the more disjointed nature of the earlier episodes this season, though, it’s head and shoulders above things like “Extinction” or “Twilight”, so I’m more likely to praise it than bury it. If you’re more willing to accept the sci-fi conventions that allow this plot to happen (or in other words, you can look past the crew acting like idiots), you might enjoy it even more than I did. Certainly it’s a slightly different take on the tropes, and that’s always worth exploring.

How it Relates to the Whole: I don’t know if there will be any direct connection between this episode and later events, but it’s safe to say that it’s Xindi related, so at least that’s something. Besides that, there’s the Malcolm-Hayes thing I discussed above, and perhaps a hint of where things are going with T’Pol, though this may just be hindsight talking. Still, even if it’s mostly disconnected from the rest of the arc, there’s enough going on that I say it makes sense to be part of Season Three, so I won’t complain.

Other: *A lot of the Xindi-centric stories this season have included one of those “Previously on…” recaps where we’re shown clips of what happened in prior episodes, with the assumption that it’s going to be relevant for the story we’re about to see. This particular “Previously on…” opens with an attack by the insectoid Xindi species, complete with Enterprise fighting back. The thing is, one of the clips they used was from “Twilight”, when Tucker had become the captain and was thus wearing a jumpsuit with yellow stripes instead of red. I guess the editors were hoping it would go by fast enough that no one would notice, but if you do notice, it can be a little puzzling, since you start wondering if “Twilight”’s going to become relevant after all. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but given how I felt about “Twilight”, it bugged me a little.

*I already said my piece about the idiocy of everyone taking their helmets off, but later on in the episode, apparently the entire ship has been given a breathable atmosphere, to the point where the crew can just walk around in their normal uniforms. I’m sure there’s some technobabble explanation for it, but because we’re not actually given one, it did cause me to do a double take. I can’t believe I’m saying I want technobabble, but I guess the “one extra line would explain everything” situation wins out in this case.

Badass Malcolm Moment: This was a hard one to pick, because it was an odd combination of Malcolm doing a lot but me being unsure how “badass” any of it is. In the end, I guess I’ll go with his actions during the climax, partly because he shows himself to be efficient and quick thinking, and partly because, if he’s getting any sort of schadenfreude enjoyment out of the situation, he does an excellent job of keeping it to himself. I guess you could call it a nice separation of business and pleasure.