Day 338: Enterprise, Azati Prime

Show: Star Trek; Enterprise

Episode Particulars: S3EP18, “Azati Prime”

 Summary: The Enterprise has finally reached Azati Prime, and they use an insectoid shuttle they found in “Hatchery” to bypass the sensor grid surrounding the planet to get a look at the weapon. It’s being constructed underwater, and according to the away team, it’s close to being completed. However, ships are still flying into it for some final maintenance touches; if someone flew in with a shuttle loaded with torpedoes, they could blow it up, though both the pod and the pilot would be lost. Archer decides he’ll be the one to fly the payload in, but as he leaves to prepare, he finds himself whisked away to the future by Daniels. Daniels tells him that in the future, the Xindi and something called “The Federation” will be allies, and work together to drive back a threat posed by the ones who created the Expanse (as hinted at in both “Chosen Realm” and “Harbinger”). If Archer sacrifices himself, he could doom the universe as he knows it. Which means the number of fates resting on his shoulders has grown from several billion to probably several squillion.

Standalone Thoughts: There is so much that this episode gets right. It advances the plot in a big way. The scene where Archer makes a tough call is perfectly played. A new wrinkle is introduced that shakes things up considerably. Archer’s dramatic speech to his crew doesn’t feel too cheesy. The climax is appropriately intense. Everything is in place for this to be a great episode. And yet, I can only call it “good” because of what I see as one major flaw.

Said flaw is that I very much feel the hand of Admiral Plot Device on the wheel. Daniels and his future knowledge always had a bit of Deus ex Machina about it, but the fact that he just happens to contact Archer about future events when the Enterprise is putting their plan to blow up the weapon into motion particularly smacks of contrivance this time. Then Archer goes on his mission, and while it’s expected that things won’t go according to plan, the way it goes wrong seems somewhat…implausible, given the sheer scale of things that had to be involved. I like the direction this arc is going, but I think the problem is that the writers were doing too much, too fast. As with “Rajiin”, I think this episode could have benefitted from being divided in two, or maybe even three. Part One could be finding Azati Prime, learning more about the weapon, and making the decision to destroy it. Then you have Daniels appear at the end of the episode, telling Archer “You can’t do this. If you do, you’ll cause even more harm than the Xindi will”, and have that be the dramatic cliffhanger. Part Two would be Daniels explaining himself, at which point you either have things play out about the same way they did here, only with more time for Archer and the others to grapple with the decision, or you have a third episode that’s basically the last ten or so minutes of this episode, only given more room to breathe and explore the concept. That way, the audience has time to get used to the idea, instead of having it sprung on them about halfway through the episode. And as a bonus, doing it this way might get rid of some of the weaker episodes from earlier in the season…

Like I said, though, the episode is generally good; it was just that one aspect that I couldn’t quite get over. It certainly works better than the first half of the season, and it’s upping the tension nicely. Even if the execution didn’t entirely work, I’m looking forward to (re)seeing how things play out. Which must mean it mostly succeeded.

How it Relates to the Whole: This episode manages to tie in a lot of events from prior episodes and ends on a note that’s all but guaranteed to make invested fans tune in next time, plus it gets the Temporal Cold War reinvolved and really sets up the T’Pol character development I’ve been hinting at. It’s pretty obvious that this is the turning point for the arc, and thus important viewing. That it’s overall a decent episode (my long rant notwithstanding) is a nice bonus.

Other: *One of the other flaws of this episode is that it seems to forget a few continuity details. One of the ones I noticed is minor, the other one seems a little more important. The minor one is the fact that everybody, including the writers, seems to have forgotten that Enterprise captured a Suliban ship back in Season Two. After it was used to rescue Archer and Malcolm in “The Communicator”, it just disappeared. One would have thought its cloaking technology might have come in handy for this mission. The more baffling error is that one of the conversations between Degra and some of his fellow Xindi council members implies that the council decided against using bioweapons. Except that was the whole point of “Rajiin”, and at the end of the episode, the council seems like they want to explore both the planet destroying option and the bioweapon option. Maybe they changed their mind offscreen, but if that was the case, we probably should have been informed of that. These aren’t major problems, but if you’ve been watching the episodes in rapid succession, they’re a bit more noticeable.

*There’s a very abrupt time jump in this episode. First we see Mayweather and Tucker learning how to fly the insectoid ship. Then we get a conversation between Hoshi and T’Pol where we learn that a) Hoshi is trying to create a translation program so the Xindi won’t get suspicious (and getting very snippy about it), and b) that it will take a few hours to install on the ship. We then immediately jump from that scene to Archer wishing Tucker and Mayweather good luck, and then they fly off. You can obviously infer that the program was completed and installed, but I think an establishing shot of Enterprise to imply that time had passed wouldn’t go amiss.

*I hinted at this way back in “Minefield”, but I would have loved Malcolm to have been on the away mission to look at the weapon, solely because it’s underwater. Watching him try to complete the mission and keep his composure while struggling with his aquaphobia would have allowed that aspect of his character to be somewhat relevant, and possibly added some tension. And of course, more Malcolm is always a nice bonus for me…

*I don’t know if anyone will admit it, but I have a strong suspicion that the Xindi weapon was modeled on Star Wars’ Death Star. Not only is it a sphere that blows up planets with a beam, but blowing up one part of it will destroy the whole thing. Granted, in this case it’s the part of the weapon that’s designed to blow up instead of a tiny access port that runs to the core of the weapon for some reason, but the parallels are a little suspect.

Badass Malcolm Moment: Malcolm’s the one who identifies that aforementioned Star Wars weak spot, thus setting the second half of the plot in motion. As I’ve said in other episodes, this comes about because he’s doing his job, but when he’s not a major player in the episode, I have to take what I can get.