the m0vie blog

Next year, Star Trek is fifty years old. We have some special stuff planned for that, but – in the meantime – we’re reviewing all of Star Trek: Enterprise this year as something of a prequel to that anniversary. This January, we’re doing the first season. Check back daily for the latest review.

Strange New World is the first episode of Star Trek: Enterprise to come from a writing team other than Brannon Braga and Rick Berman. Berman and Braga would dominate the writing credits for the first season. Even when the final teleplay was credited to another writer or writing team, there was often a “story by” credit given to Berman and Braga. Braga himself has conceded that he essentially re-wrote all of the episodes of the first season.

Still, Strange New World is credited to the writing team of Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong. Both had worked on Star Trek: Voyager before migrated to Star Trek: Enterprise along with André Bormanis. Sussman had pitched the story for Meld and worked on a number of solo stories and scripts before teaming with Strong on the seventh and final season of the show. The two would remain a writing team for the first two seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise, hitting their stride with some of the strongest episodes of the troubled second season.

Strange New World is an interesting début for the pair. On the hand, it is a story that celebrates the unique place of Star Trek: Enterprise in the Star Trek pantheon. It’s a story about how great it must be to set foot on an alien planet, and how wondrous it must be to breath air from outside our atmosphere. With its emphasis on shuttlepods and primitive transporters, it does remain relatively true to the prequel premise of Enterprise.

On the other hand, Strange New World is a very familiar Star Trek template. Indeed, it’s a very familiar first season template. It’s the episode where the crew of the ship are exposed to some strange outside force that makes them all act out of character. It’s something of a Star Trek standard. The original Star Trek had The Naked Time and Star Trek: The Next Generation had The Naked Now, while Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had both Babel and Dramatis Personae. In many ways, Strange New World feels like a familiar old story.

To be fair, there are lots of reasons to do an “out of character” episode so early in a show’s run. In terms of science-fiction plots, it’s a very basic and easy-to-justify premise. It’s also an effective way to demonstrate that our heroes are engaging with forces that are beyond our comprehension. Space isn’t just home to Klingons or Romulans, but to existential horrors that will chip away at and erode our very sense of self. It’s a great hook, and it makes sense to include a story like this in the first season of a prequel show.

From a purely pragmatic production point of view, these stories are also great for establishing the dramatic ability of the cast. Auditioning the primary cast of show will generally ensure that you end up with an ensemble that can play the roles as written. However, if you want to grow and develop those roles, it’s probably best to play to the strengths of the performers. Consider how Voyager re-conceptualised Tom Paris to fit Robert Duncan McNeill’s style – turning him more into “cool dad” rather than “flirty rogue”, or how Deep Space Nine eventually figured out how to make Jadzia Dax work for Terry Farrell.

So episodes like Strange New World are a great opportunity to see what the cast can do. Asking various performers to step outside the comfort zone established in the pilot is the best way to get a sense of their relative skill level. And Strange New World demonstrates that Connor Trineer is probably going to be one of the ensemble’s best assets. (Of course, Unexpected would help to cement that, putting him through the old “thankless script” routine.) It also confirmed that Jolene Blalock was reliable in the role of T’Pol, even if the writing was not always ideal.

However, the flip side of that equation is the fact that this is essentially a very traditional Star Trek plot. “This experience is only marginally different,” T’Pol remarks of her trip to the planet, and she is correct. One of the more appealing attributes of doing a prequel series rather than a sequel series was the opportunity to get away from the familiar Star Trek plots and clichés – an opportunity to engage with a wondrous universe, embracing the kind of things that have become commonplace in the later shows.

And, for a little while, Strange New World seems to strike that note. This is the story of one of the crew’s first encounters with an inhabitable planet. It isn’t the first, as Broken Bow had the crew visiting Rigel X and Qo’nos, while Fight or Flight had the crew stopping at another planet to let Hoshi’s pet slug off the ship. Still, there’s a sense of excitement and novelty to all this. There’s a sense that Archer stumbling across a planet like this is a much bigger deal than Kirk or Picard encountering another M-class planet.

Framing the arrival through the eyes of the lower-deck crew members is a nice touch as well. After all, we’ve only seen the senior staff leave the ship up to this point. Most of the less senior crew members have been cooped up on a ship that resembles a submarine since Broken Bow. So having the crew assemble around the viewports to get a good look at this new planet is an endearing visual. It’s nice to get a sense that the universe is big and vast and amazing, and it comes quite close to fulfilling the promise that Enterprise would put more relatable characters in space.

It’s also nice to get a sense of life on the ship that extends beyond characters likely to be invited to dine at the captain’s table. One of the more disappointing aspects of Voyager was the way that the show never built up a proper supporting cast of characters. Despite the fact that the show was about two crews stuck on a ship together trying to get home, it often felt like it was the leads and the guest stars of a given week. In contrast Deep Space Nine managed to build up a pretty solid recurring cast over its seven years on the air.

Enterprise eventually strikes something of an awkward balance here. The show develops an impressive recurring cast of characters like Soval, Forrest, Shran, Hernandez or Duras. However, the vast majority of these characters are outside the crew of the Enterprise. Strange New World introduces two lower-deck crew members, Ethan Novakovich and Elizabeth Cutler. Novakovich was never seen again – although he had been designed as a one-shot guest star. Cutler appeared twice more over the course of the first season and was fleetingly mentioned in the third.

(It is worth noting that the premature death of Kellie Waymire in November 2003 may have been a factor in Cutler’s disappearance from the show. According to producer Rick Berman, the show had been planning to bring Cutler back at the time of Waymire’s passing. However, the character had not appeared at all during the show’s second season. Either way, it’s disappointing that Cutler was really the only major recurring Enterprise crew member outside the regular cast for the first few seasons.)

Of course, the reason that Novakovich was unlikely to recur is due to the fact that he was originally intended to die over the course of Strange New World. Indeed, the episode seems structured so that Novakovich’s death is practically a given. He is the first crew member to freak out on the alien planet, he is put through the transporter, and he suffers unforeseen complications from a strange infection. Taking all that into consideration, Novakovich may just be the luckiest member of Starfleet not to appear in the opening credits of any series.

As Mike Sussman has confessed, the original plan to kill off Novakovich met with some understandable resistance:

In an early draft, Novakovich did die after sniffing the alien pollen (I guess that means he would’ve been pushing up the hallucinogenic daisies). It was felt at the time that the death of a crewmember would require time to show Archer and the crew dealing with the loss, and there wasn’t time for such a scene. Personally, I always liked how Kirk shrugged off casualty reports like they were yesterday’s sports scores.

While Sussman is perhaps being a little too glib, it does raise an interesting discussion about Enterprise‘s attitude towards crew casualties.

As with a lot of the choices facing the production staff on Enterprise, it was a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. On the one hand, killing crew members off regularly was a tired storytelling device. There’s a reason that the term “red shirt” is used with such self-aware irony. Killing off characters we hardly know in order to generate drama is lazy writing. On a purely practical note, it’s hard to accept the Enterprise as a ship alone on the frontier if it has so many replacements to hand that it can handily kill off crew members every other week.

On the other hand, the threats to the ship and the crew needed to feel real and meaningful. These were pioneers carving out a new frontier. They were engaging in a risky activity. The production staff have argued that Enterprise was modeled on The Right Stuff, the story of NASA’s attempts to put men into space. However, those attempts cost lives. As tragic as those losses might be, that element of risk gave the decision to press on more weight than it might otherwise have had.

In the documentary Uncharted Territory, writer Chris Black remembers having these sorts of discussions about the show:

I remember at one point coming in and pitching some story – I don’t even remember what it was. There was an issue with the transporter and it didn’t work and being told, “No, no, no, the ship works fine; everything works fine.” And it was like… really? Because I thought kinda the premise of the show was that it was new and untested? And it was like, “No, the ship works fine.” So it was those kind of things where I felt the premise of the show was slowly being whittled away. And, like I say, that may well have come down from studio and network. I don’t know.

Here, despite being told that the transporter is a risky and unsafe device and witnessing Novakovich beamed up with branches and leaves embedded in his body, it all works out okay in the end. Phlox can repair the damage. There are no lasting repercussions or consequences.

This became something of an on-going debate about the show. Some fans quite liked the idea that death wasn’t treated as casually as it had been on Voyager. Other fans protested that the refusal to kill off supporting cast members made everything feel a little too “safe” for a ship that was supposed to pioneering space exploration. While both sides of the argument have valid points, it’s something of a false dichotomy.

It is possible to kill off a guest star and have the death mean something. On The Next Generation, The Bonding is an episode built around the death of a co-star the audience never actually met. On Deep Space Nine, The Ship goes out of its way to mourn the loss of crew members killed during an away mission. It would have been quite easy to kill of Novakovich without resorting to traditional “red shirt” clichés, if Enterprise were a more adventurous show.

Novakovich could have been introduced in earlier episodes like Broken Bow or Fight or Flight. To avoid making his fate too obvious, he could have been introduced as Archer’s first choice for science officer, replaced by T’Pol. (After all, one imagines that must have come up at some point.) Or he could have been a supporting character and friend to another member of the main cast. He could have been working in engineering on science stuff, or been Reed’s old buddy from college. These are fairly cliché, but they’re more effective than “that guy we just met.”

Alternatively, the show could have kept the character as a one shot character first appearing in this episode. After all, maybe it’s implausible for Archer or the senior staff to already know everybody on board. Instead, his death could have been carried over to the next episode. Open the episode with his funeral, have the crew reflect on his loss and the implications of his death. Of course, Unexpected would have been a bad fit for that sort of plot, but it might work well in the background of something like Vox Sola or Silent Enemy.

This approach would also have the benefit of ensuring that Unexpected was not the fourth episode of the show to air, which is enough alone to recommend it. However, Enterprise is not a show that leans towards serialisation or long-form storytelling, at least not in its first season. What is raised within an episode has to be dealt with within the forty-five minutes of that episode. It is something that causes a lot of problems in the first season, and has the net effect of diminishing how big a deal this should be and how real the concerns must be.

For better or worse, the production team decided not to kill of Novakovich. The trip through the transporter is an excuse for some pretty nice make-up work, but it’s little more than a hiccup in the episode. One wonders why Archer doesn’t just order the rest of the away team through the transporter, knowing that Phlox will be able to fix most of them up quite nicely. The transporter might be a tiny bit glitchy under sub-optimal conditions, but between this and its handy resolution to Broken Bow, it’s a lot harder to accept the implicit risk of the device.

Strange New World is also the first point where the show puts establishing risk and stakes on the long-finger. From here until the third season, the show seems to push the idea of demonstrating the dangers of space travel further and further out, as Mike Sussman has conceded:

Who knew then that, two years later, the lack of casualties would be criticised to the other extreme as unrealistic. “It was never intentional,” Sussman says. “It’s just that whenever we tried to kill someone, it never quite seemed the right way to do it, so it never happened.”

It became something that the show clearly wanted to do, but never found the time to explore. This is an understandable problem, even if it’s hard to accept that Enterprise thought episodes like Unexpected, Two Days and Two Nights and Acquisition were better ideas than exploring the risks that come with space flight.

Of course, the low casualty rate on Enterprise might be more plausible if the plots didn’t hinge of the crew behaving like over-eager amateurs. Had Archer been more cautious or professional during these missions, the lack of a bodycount would make sense. Unfortunately, many of the early episodes of Enterprise rely on the crew behaving like fools in order to generate plot – Archer makes a decision that puts the crew in an risky position. Fight or Flight is an example, with Archer’s heroic conduct nearly getting the ship killed. Here, he strands a team on a strange planet.

The way that Archer the crew manage to consistently escape without any trouble (or any cost) becomes frustration, as does their refusal to learn from any of the experiences. In Strange New World, T’Pol repeatedly cautions the crew about the need to properly survey the planet before sending down a team. Her cautious approach is vindicated when it turns out that local planet life creates spores that drive the crew into a paranoid frenzy. Had Archer listened to her and done the proper investigation, the risk could have been avoided.

However, Strange New World doesn’t give us a scene where Archer and Trip apologise to T’Pol for disregarding her advice out of hand. Instead, the show offers a scene where Phlox is very apologetic about not being able to foresee the way that Novakovich’s symptoms might develop. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Captain,” he tells Archer. There’s no acknowledgement of the fact that Archer’s gung-ho attitudes were responsible for sending Novakovich down to the planet in the first place.

The episode also lacks any sense that Archer and Trip have learned from the experience at all. The very next episode features Trip repeating the mistakes made here, failing to appreciate that things that look innocent may be dangerous. Over the course of the series, Archer will make a number of similar errors, foolhardily refusing to treat nature and the universe with the respect that it deserves. It’s this attitude, coupled with the lack of any real consequences, that sits so uncomfortably.

To be fair, this is another point where discussion over Enterprise tends to split. There’s an argument that Archer and his crew are inexperienced and unseasoned. These are precisely the sorts of mistakes that somebody with no knowledge of the cosmos would make. There’s no reason that Archer should be as experienced and as capable as Kirk or Picard, because he doesn’t have any frame of reference for what is going on.

On the other hand, episodes like Strange New World are frequently used as a crutch against Archer. They are presented as evidence against the character, suggesting that Archer is incompetent or incapable. To be fair, this is an exaggeration. While the character’s happy-go-lucky attitude towards the galaxy could be unsettling and frustrating, the show was struggling to find the right balance in its portrayal of mankind’s first journey to the stars.

As with most issues on Enterprise, the disagreement presents a false dichotomy and the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The problem wasn’t so much that Archer made stupid mistakes during his first year in command of the ship, the problem was that he refused to learn from them. Archer never seemed appropriately humbled or enlightened by his encounters. The show would repeat the formula far too often.

One of the defining moments for The Next Generation occurred when Q humbled Picard in Q Who? After a season-and-a-half of treating mankind as hyper-competent and hyper-evolved, it was a moment that revealed that the Federation was not ready for everything. The problem with the first and second seasons of Enterprise is that it feels like Archer confronts these moments on a weekly basis, but it takes him two years to reach the epiphany.

Still, there are nice moments in Strange New World. The idea of “space age ghost stories” is a surprisingly endearing concept, and one that offers some charming world-building – it’s a nice example of Enterprise doing its “things are different in the future, but not too different” schtick. It also ranks as the best use of Travis all season, and the idea of space-age urban legends that sound suspiciously like the kinda crap that Kirk and Picard faced on a weekly basis is very witty.

“Some people say it was an alien life form that got into him, others think it was the ghost of a dead crewman,” Mayweather tells us, in what sounds like a snippet overheard from a pitch meeting. “I never knew what to believe, but Webb is still out there, drifting. When the subspace noise is real low, some comm. officers say they can still hear the echo of his distress call. Beep, Beep.” It’s a very corny little scene, but it works very well.

Although Strange New World was written before 9/11 – it was written before the show was even cast – it also manages to engage with post-9/11 realities. Many of the individual elements of the first season seem bizarrely prescient in this respect, even if it doesn’t quite add up to the same biting social commentary that Deep Space Nine offered in the nineties. Here, there’s a very heavy undertone of anxiety and paranoia.

When Trip rants and raves about T’Pol’s plots and Vulcan conspiracy, he voices fears that seem to echo the concerns of the “truther” movement. He is suddenly accusing T’Pol of lies and cover-ups, arguing that the destruction of Enterprise and the loss of everybody on board would be part of some elaborate conspiracy to justify a political end. “Your people have been telling us that kind of crap for a hundred years,” he accuses. “Looks like you finally found a way to put us back in our cage.”

When Travis voices confusion, Trip articulates his theories, “Imagine the news back home, Travis. Enterprise crew found dead. Six weeks into their historic voyage, the bodies of all eighty two crewmembers were located on an uninhabited world. A Vulcan ship made the unfortunate discovery. Cause of death remains a mystery. But what the Vulcans won’t say is they know exactly who attacked us. In fact, they arranged the whole thing.” It sounds suspiciously like the arguments of people who believe that the Twin Towers were destroyed by the government.

This is, of course, all a coincidence. Airing less than a month after the attacks, Strange New World aired before the “truther” movement had an opportunity to become mainstream. Indeed, given the awkwardness with which Enterprise would try to deal with the post-9/11 climate during its first two years on the air, it seems unlikely that Strange New World could have been written (or even re-written) as an commentary or exploration of that culture. It’s just a nice little point of resonance.

To be fair, there is a timeless element to the paranoia at the heart of Strange New World. With a story by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, it’s easy to imagine Strange New World as a companion piece to Braga’s own Cathexis from the first season of Star Trek: Voyager. The episode riffs on a very retro sense of paranoia and mistrust. It hits on the same core themes as The Monsters are Due on Maple Street and almost plays as an example of Cold War paranoia about supposed allies colluding with sinister outside forces.

Along with the focus on trippy drugs and strange pollen, this makes Strange New World feel a little bit like a fifties or sixties throwback. (As much as the coincidental echoes of the “truther” movement would seem to anchor it in the present.) “You’ve all been exposed to a psychotropic compound,” Archer warns the away team. “It causes heightened anxiety; hallucinations.” He seems like a public service announcement from the late fifties or early sixties. LSD will make you see rock monsters and freak out with your friends.

Indeed, Strange New World pushes the “drug trip” aspect of the story quite heavily. Not only is the drug that caused the freak out a “psychotropic compound” like LSD, it is also derived from a flower, recalling opiates. “The compound comes from the pollen of a flower,” Phlox advises. “We think it was blown down from the mountains when the wind started.” The rather specific mention of the mountains evokes the opium trade, which flourishes along the mountain ranges of Asia. The trade flourished during the late fifties and sixties.

Another example of overlap between sixties and contemporary culture, it is worth noting that the production of opium ties back into the post-9/11 War on Terror. By November 2001, a month after Strange New World aired, a collapsing national economy in the wake of an invasion launched the week that Strange New World aired had seen more and more Afghan farmers resorting to the production of the opium poppy in order to sustain themselves.

All of this gives Strange New World a rather strange resonance. As a television show, Enterprise exists in a rather strange middle ground between the present and the past. The show is structured both as a sequel to Star Trek: First Contact and a prequel to the original Star Trek. As such, it is rooted in both the sixties and the present, something that the show often struggles to reconcile. (Consider, for example, its issues with gender and sexuality – Enterprise‘s attempts at doing a “sex romp” never end well.)

However, Strange New World is perfectly positioned between the two eras, the rare example of an episode that could stand very well as a piece of sixties science-fiction, but also resonates with contemporary audiences. It’s probably more down to luck than design, but it does feel worthy of note and acknowledgement. In a way, despite the problems with the episode, the first season of Enterprise would be a lot stronger if more episodes could strike that sort of balance.

That said, it is strange that the first season’s attempts to make the crew of the ship more relatable consist primarily of making them more racist. Coupled with the fact that this is the least ethnically diverse ensemble since The Next Generation, the dynamic is distinctly uncomfortable. Even before Trip catches cavern fever, he is making all sorts of derogatory remarks about T’Pol. When Cutler politely attempts to strike up a conversation with T’Pol, Trip quips, “You’d have better luck making friends with a house fly.”

It would be one thing if the crew’s treatment of T’Pol in the cave were an anomaly, but Strange New Worlds never acknowledges that this is just an exaggerated form of the prejudice that she has been facing since joining the mission. While Archer hasn’t threatened T’Pol with a phase pistol, his attitude towards her isn’t that different from Trip’s own paranoid fantasies. When she comes on board in Broken Bow, he almost immediately accuses her of being a Vulcan spy.

(To be fair, it is clear that Enterprise is trying to replicate the “big three” dynamic that defined the original show, casting Trip as McCoy and T’Pol as Spock. Certainly, McCoy was more than capable of making racist remarks about Spock. The difference is that Kirk tended to offset McCoy’s racism, and that he was life-long friends with both characters. In contrast, both Archer and Trip both seem aligned against T’Pol from the outset of Enterprise – almost as if they are picking on the new girl who would dare to ruin their boys’ club.)

Still, with Strange New World, the show is working on developing its cast dynamics. While Archer, Trip and T’Pol are established as the show’s de facto lead characters, the series is trying to fit the rest together. Strange New World tries putting Trip and Mayweather together as buddies, to see if the two play well off one another. The results are less-than-stellar, with Mayweather feeling less essential to the story than either Novakovich or Cutler.

To be fair, while the show never figured out how to work with the character, Enterprise did attempt to find dynamics that could work for Mayweather. When Trip didn’t strike it off with Mayweather, the show would try to push Reed and Mayweather in Breaking the Ice. (Oddly enough, the show would finally manage to get a bro-mantic pairing to work with Trip and Reed, locking Mayweather out.)

Speaking of Reed, the early first season episodes tend to play the character more as the Captain’s wry personal assistant than as tactical or security officer. Here, he’s presented as the somewhat cynical and detached military man who has to put up with Archer’s more relaxed and personal command style. “You’d make a good two metre man,” Archer suggests, after throwing a water polo ball at his security officer. “Too bad we don’t have a pool on board.” Reed deadpans, with all the sincerity of Kiff Kroaker, “A shame.”

(To pick a more practical example, it is Reed who points out that it is impossible to land the shuttle pod during the hurricane, over Archer’s objections. Reed is the character who essentially forces the issue here, pushing Archer to make the difficult – but correct – choice, while Archer himself is willing to risk more lives against unreasonable odds. It’s a scene that reinforces the sense that Archer is a character who isn’t necessarily cut out for command.)

Dominic Keating does great work with the minimal material given to him, playing Reed with just the right amount of wry detachment to make the dynamic work. There are a number of points in the early episodes where Reed’s answers seem just a little too sharp or too smart, with just the faintest hint of sarcasm underpinning them. There’s a lovely little sequence in Unexpected where Archer asks about the safety of lighting the ship’s exhaust, and Reed seems to be humouring him.

Strange New World, like Fight or Flight before it, is an episode of Enterprise that struggles to reconcile the old and the new. The episode tries to engage with the novelty of this sort of exploration, while struggling against the familiarity of Star Trek storytelling. While it doesn’t quite succeed, the result is interesting and suggests potential for the future. Strange New World might not be strange enough or new enough, but it seems at least aware of the need to break out of the mold.

You might be interested in our other reviews of the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise:

• Broken Bow
• Fight or Flight
• Strange New World
• Unexpected
• Terra Nova
• The Andorian Incident
• Breaking the Ice
• Civilisation
• Fortunate Son
• Cold Front
• Silent Enemy
• Dear Doctor
• Sleeping Dogs
• Shadows of P’Jem
• Shuttlepod One
• Fusion
• Rogue Planet
• Acquisition
• Oasis
• Detained
• Vox Sola
• Fallen Hero
• Desert Crossing
• Two Days and Two Nights
• Shockwave, Part I

Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: 9/11, Archer, Brannon Braga, david livingston, death, drugs, enterprise, Jonathan Archer, lsd, malcolm reed, mike sussman, opium, paranoia, phyllis strong, red shirts, reed, Rick Berman, star trek, star trek: enterprise, strange new world, t'pol, Television, Transporter, vulcan |