Athene Watches Star Trek Enterprise: How To Get Away With Franchise Murder
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You know, after thinking about it, there might be a more charitable interpretation of that scene: until now, every human around T'Pol have been insufferable assholes criticizing her every actions despite her being right every single time, so she might simply not be inclined to follow their "advice" such as trying again their food even if she had bad experience with it before.
But in this episode Tucker, instead of being a criticizing smug dick to her culture like Archer is 24/7, made the effort to try to get in her shoes and understand her and her culture, in order to give an advice that will actually be helpful.
So she might be more inclined to try one of the favorite foods of the one person who's been actually nice and helpful to her and began to understand that space is big and that their
Well, that would be if the rest of the series didn't existed of course...
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DocSpooky
Humblest in the World
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Remember to be careful when juggling objects of different shapes!
Space Trucking, Four on the Floor
Athene
Rise for the Shadow Queen
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There was something off about Fortunate Son that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I mean aside from bad characterization, no sense of stakes, pointless canon cameos and the dreaded ANTHROCHAUVANISM, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it until my playlist switched to my Master Filk List and I realized with every song what the problem was
♫ Now it's two months out and it's two months back
When you're pushing the speed of light
Twenty years on your homeworld's track
Pushing the speed of light
And your friends are gone and your lovers too
And there's damn-all left that you can do
And you try to lie, but you know it's true ♫
Ah! There it is! Its trying to crib notes from something it does not thematically match at all. The Horizon and Boomers of Enterprise are trying to be like Merchanters or equivalent, but without the technological or societal basis that those types of archetypes are based on! Let me explain:
We begin the episode experiencing the, hmmm, I guess we're supposed to think "joys" but it looks like absolute fucking boredom. Namely, throwing a football very far on a ship with reduced gravity. Probably too far since we've been told in the past that these ships operate at .9G and the ball sails a good 100 yards with zero sink from end to end of a hundred meter cargo bay, so I dunno man. This is unfortunately the coolest thing the writers could come up, and the best reason for staying on a ship, forever.
Oh yeah dude, who would want to give up all this! Anyway, they're immediately attacked by pirates. Like, immediately, before they had to think of anything else besides "hauling cargo" and "throwing a football over cargo" to have these guys do. Its the Nausicaans so that we can turn to someone and go "OH I KNOW THOSE GUYS. REMEMBER THEM?" like all prequels.
Anyway, we head back to Enterprise where Archer gets word from Forrest about the attack. The Fortunate has popped its distress beacon and hasn't responded to any hails. Enterprise is substantially faster than other Starfleet ships so even with how far away they are, they're only a day and a half away from the Fortunate while the second fastest ship is three weeks away. They set a course and its supposed to be Mayweather's time to shine so he gets to give a briefing for a change.
Oh no wait, sorry, he doesn't give a briefing because his background turns out to be actively useless and so his first contribution is to point out that people fuck and that safe sex was lost in The Eugenics War, I guess. He continues to be helpful:
"Hey what guns do they have on this thing?"
"Dunno!"
Thanks dude. Also there is absolutely no way that Reed would need ask "why" I think he was just trying to get Mayweather back into the spotlight since this is his only chance to shine and he's blown it twice in a row.
They arrive to find the ship fucked up, with heavy damage and a warp core out of action. Comms are down so they immediately head out with Phlox to board it. They're met at the door by the XO, Mattew Ryan who is immediately the most suspicious person who has ever lived as he repeatedly tries to get them to leave. He could only be more suspicious if he was trailing 20 tons of weed, Romulan Ale and Varon-T disruptors from the side hatches. Luckily, the crew of the Enterprise are mostly comprised of absolute dopes so they never catch on. As an aside, we learn that Archer has never heard of Nausicaans, indicating he has done zero research and has zero institutional knowledge of the political or military situation of human travelled areas of space.
They manage to convince Ryan to let them stay around since their captain is injured so Phlox should treat them. They have to convince him to let them upgrade and repair his systems, which again should be a huge fucking clue that some shit is going down but they don't notice him acting suspicious. What with the Nausicaan he has captured and has been torturing and all. We've got ourselves one of the 8 basic plots of Star Trek: Captain Ahab's Space Whale.
However rather than focus on anything cool, lets have more of Travis not only being lame but also making us question what the fuck is going on in this setting. Ryan not only has a grudge against the Nausicaans but he's resentful towards the forward march of progress for absolutely no fucking reason. See, these freighters are incredibly slow. A run takes five years with no subjective time difference and the writers have decided that they must have their own culture as a result that the "Boomers" like all Boomers are big angry at progress effecting.
My dude, you experience zero time dilation because you're at warp. Five years inside are five years outside. You have FTL communication that allows you to connect to other places in real time. This is not a work where you're separated from other people in any way except physically and being able to do runs faster, safer and more often is zero threat to your way of life. You want to spend all your time hauling cargo? Keep doing it! You can now carry more and have better provisions! You can see other people every 3-6 months instead of every 2-5 years. OH NO THE HORROR.
See they're trying to crib something from harder works of scifi where relativity matters and spending time near the speed of light cuts you off from the rest of humanity creating significant cultural and emotional drift. Songs like Benson Arizona and Pushing The Speed of Light sing about the emotional consequences of remaining the same age while everyone else dies. Universes like CJ Cherryh's have extremely independent, libertarian merchanters who fly massive cargo vessels equivalent to a warship in a still highly capitalist system, able to exert significant military and political power on the universe. In Lancer, those who choose to spend large parts of their life at near-light are from the perspective of the objective time universe near immortals and often legends. In this universe, you just spent five years masturbating into the same socks over and over again. You can literally video call anyone you know in this setting, you are not cut off from anyone except physically. I have spent more time separated from some people I know than they have! The engine upgrade where the ship is 10 times faster doesn't even lead to situations for them where a generational ship arrives after ten thousand years to find someone else has colonized a planet first! It just saves you time!
Travis spends a good portion of the length trying to convince this incredibly suspicious guy to join Starfleet and absolutely striking out. He says Starfleet has three more NX classes on the way and they'll need experienced people like Ryan and I have to ask: Why? What do you bring to the table? This episode lets us know that maybe Mayweather was actually less qualified to join Starfleet than someone who operated in NEO. The ship heads in a more or less straight line for years at a time, how does this make him a better choice for pilot and navigator? This is like enlisting someone who has only ever played Desert Bus into the military as an air combat drone pilot. He's been playing it his entire life guys, I think he knows what he's doing!
The gravity isn't even the same, Travis in another episode comments that he had an extremely tough time adapting to 1G which is Starfleet standard and by extension of them being always at .9 G on the freighters, he doesn't even have much zero G experience necessarily. His experience and knowledge aren't that much greater than anyone elses, Archer just doesn't do the homework. The new ships are absolutely eclipsing and invalidating what experience he does have and the alien allies of Earth know far more than he does. He can't even really effectively convince this dude to join Starfleet because the guy views him as an outsider seeking to steal their way of life and culture. He's useless and this is his one character trait. There are two other characters where they would have been better served being the Spacer than him! I'll go over one of them next episode.
In the meantime though, T'Pol, one of the useful members of the crew, has absolutely clued on to the fact that they have a hostage. Ryan tries to play dumb and say its a skunk but even Archer isn't fooled at that point since T'Pol has told him the exact species of lifesign she detected, knowing that he would have otherwise fallen for the skunk trick. Archer threatens to take back all the nice shit he gave them since Ryan won't give up his hostage until Ryan easily bamboozles him into getting trapped in a cargo container that he ejects into space and blasts the Enterprise with a surprise attack, taking off at warp.
Embarrassing. Absolutely Embarrassing.
Realizing they still have gosh, 20 minutes left in the episode, the blast has temporarily stalled Enterprise and knocked out her long range sensors. Ryan is going to use codes he's beaten out of a prisoner to go Full Ahab on the Nausicaans because his family was killed by them and he switched ships and the Nausicaans have injured his replacement father. His torture isn't going very well and the Nausicaan insults his torture prowess and offers to give him some pointers, laughing his ass off. Embarrassing. Absolutely Embarrassing. Anyway, I'm sure you can trust the codes of the dude making fun of how you tortured him or indeed, anyone you tortured.
Meanwhile aboard Enterprise, they're having a D-Tier philosophical debate about whether Ryan should go after the Nausicaans or not.
Archer again believes in only a single human culture that he is the arbiter of. Archer could say they've violated what he feels is right or he's worried about the implications of their actions or fallout from them, or even just the lives of everyone involved. But no, by being Human they are subject to what he thinks they should do and he's worried they're going to hurt the Nausicaans. There are no cultural differences, no different philosophies, no differing opinions on how to handle things. They have to follow the immutable rules of humanity. No wonder the Klingons called the Federation a "Homo Sapiens Only Club", this is the guy who gets it started! I'm going to get into this later but I don't even know who the fuck these freighter guys are really under or how they work or anything like that, because the writers don't seem to know. They're a part of "Earth Cargo Services" under the "Earth Cargo Authority" and none of this shit seems to have gotten defined that well. There's apparently a deleted line saying he's violating ECS regulations but can Archer enforce ECA rules? What's the relationship between these two? You fuckers needed to eat your god damn vegetables and do some world building across some episodes before you spent a single episode on these guys and no more for three years. Ryan accuses Travis of trying to "recruit" him and there's some frankly bizarre lines later, so I don't think Archer has the authority here. Except for the authority granted to him by the immutable, hard coded morals of humanity encased within its genome, subject to no situational, cultural or philosophical considerations.
Also Archer could maybe, I dunno, do something about the piracy? You have full construction specifications for Phase Cannons on your ship which would make this thing an absolute dreadnaught against Nausicaan ships and able to easily defend itself. The Nausicaans stand no chance against Enterprise even without that upgrade so you could easily do punitive actions in the place of Ryan. Ryan is Full Ahab and so he's a danger to his crew but the problem remains.
Anyway, it turned out his hostage lied to him and he's getting absolutely owned by Nausicaans who want their hostage back and have boarded the absolutely disabled Fortunate to get him back. Archer shows up to be ineffectual:
I'm tired, so very tired. Next up, we're going to do a little rearranging and do the Reed episode next. Unfortunately he doesn't even get to have an episode to himself, but what can you do?
♫ Now it's two months out and it's two months back
When you're pushing the speed of light
Twenty years on your homeworld's track
Pushing the speed of light
And your friends are gone and your lovers too
And there's damn-all left that you can do
And you try to lie, but you know it's true ♫
Ah! There it is! Its trying to crib notes from something it does not thematically match at all. The Horizon and Boomers of Enterprise are trying to be like Merchanters or equivalent, but without the technological or societal basis that those types of archetypes are based on! Let me explain:
We begin the episode experiencing the, hmmm, I guess we're supposed to think "joys" but it looks like absolute fucking boredom. Namely, throwing a football very far on a ship with reduced gravity. Probably too far since we've been told in the past that these ships operate at .9G and the ball sails a good 100 yards with zero sink from end to end of a hundred meter cargo bay, so I dunno man. This is unfortunately the coolest thing the writers could come up, and the best reason for staying on a ship, forever.
Oh yeah dude, who would want to give up all this! Anyway, they're immediately attacked by pirates. Like, immediately, before they had to think of anything else besides "hauling cargo" and "throwing a football over cargo" to have these guys do. Its the Nausicaans so that we can turn to someone and go "OH I KNOW THOSE GUYS. REMEMBER THEM?" like all prequels.
Anyway, we head back to Enterprise where Archer gets word from Forrest about the attack. The Fortunate has popped its distress beacon and hasn't responded to any hails. Enterprise is substantially faster than other Starfleet ships so even with how far away they are, they're only a day and a half away from the Fortunate while the second fastest ship is three weeks away. They set a course and its supposed to be Mayweather's time to shine so he gets to give a briefing for a change.
Oh no wait, sorry, he doesn't give a briefing because his background turns out to be actively useless and so his first contribution is to point out that people fuck and that safe sex was lost in The Eugenics War, I guess. He continues to be helpful:
"Hey what guns do they have on this thing?"
"Dunno!"
Thanks dude. Also there is absolutely no way that Reed would need ask "why" I think he was just trying to get Mayweather back into the spotlight since this is his only chance to shine and he's blown it twice in a row.
They arrive to find the ship fucked up, with heavy damage and a warp core out of action. Comms are down so they immediately head out with Phlox to board it. They're met at the door by the XO, Mattew Ryan who is immediately the most suspicious person who has ever lived as he repeatedly tries to get them to leave. He could only be more suspicious if he was trailing 20 tons of weed, Romulan Ale and Varon-T disruptors from the side hatches. Luckily, the crew of the Enterprise are mostly comprised of absolute dopes so they never catch on. As an aside, we learn that Archer has never heard of Nausicaans, indicating he has done zero research and has zero institutional knowledge of the political or military situation of human travelled areas of space.
They manage to convince Ryan to let them stay around since their captain is injured so Phlox should treat them. They have to convince him to let them upgrade and repair his systems, which again should be a huge fucking clue that some shit is going down but they don't notice him acting suspicious. What with the Nausicaan he has captured and has been torturing and all. We've got ourselves one of the 8 basic plots of Star Trek: Captain Ahab's Space Whale.
However rather than focus on anything cool, lets have more of Travis not only being lame but also making us question what the fuck is going on in this setting. Ryan not only has a grudge against the Nausicaans but he's resentful towards the forward march of progress for absolutely no fucking reason. See, these freighters are incredibly slow. A run takes five years with no subjective time difference and the writers have decided that they must have their own culture as a result that the "Boomers" like all Boomers are big angry at progress effecting.
My dude, you experience zero time dilation because you're at warp. Five years inside are five years outside. You have FTL communication that allows you to connect to other places in real time. This is not a work where you're separated from other people in any way except physically and being able to do runs faster, safer and more often is zero threat to your way of life. You want to spend all your time hauling cargo? Keep doing it! You can now carry more and have better provisions! You can see other people every 3-6 months instead of every 2-5 years. OH NO THE HORROR.
See they're trying to crib something from harder works of scifi where relativity matters and spending time near the speed of light cuts you off from the rest of humanity creating significant cultural and emotional drift. Songs like Benson Arizona and Pushing The Speed of Light sing about the emotional consequences of remaining the same age while everyone else dies. Universes like CJ Cherryh's have extremely independent, libertarian merchanters who fly massive cargo vessels equivalent to a warship in a still highly capitalist system, able to exert significant military and political power on the universe. In Lancer, those who choose to spend large parts of their life at near-light are from the perspective of the objective time universe near immortals and often legends. In this universe, you just spent five years masturbating into the same socks over and over again. You can literally video call anyone you know in this setting, you are not cut off from anyone except physically. I have spent more time separated from some people I know than they have! The engine upgrade where the ship is 10 times faster doesn't even lead to situations for them where a generational ship arrives after ten thousand years to find someone else has colonized a planet first! It just saves you time!
Travis spends a good portion of the length trying to convince this incredibly suspicious guy to join Starfleet and absolutely striking out. He says Starfleet has three more NX classes on the way and they'll need experienced people like Ryan and I have to ask: Why? What do you bring to the table? This episode lets us know that maybe Mayweather was actually less qualified to join Starfleet than someone who operated in NEO. The ship heads in a more or less straight line for years at a time, how does this make him a better choice for pilot and navigator? This is like enlisting someone who has only ever played Desert Bus into the military as an air combat drone pilot. He's been playing it his entire life guys, I think he knows what he's doing!
The gravity isn't even the same, Travis in another episode comments that he had an extremely tough time adapting to 1G which is Starfleet standard and by extension of them being always at .9 G on the freighters, he doesn't even have much zero G experience necessarily. His experience and knowledge aren't that much greater than anyone elses, Archer just doesn't do the homework. The new ships are absolutely eclipsing and invalidating what experience he does have and the alien allies of Earth know far more than he does. He can't even really effectively convince this dude to join Starfleet because the guy views him as an outsider seeking to steal their way of life and culture. He's useless and this is his one character trait. There are two other characters where they would have been better served being the Spacer than him! I'll go over one of them next episode.
In the meantime though, T'Pol, one of the useful members of the crew, has absolutely clued on to the fact that they have a hostage. Ryan tries to play dumb and say its a skunk but even Archer isn't fooled at that point since T'Pol has told him the exact species of lifesign she detected, knowing that he would have otherwise fallen for the skunk trick. Archer threatens to take back all the nice shit he gave them since Ryan won't give up his hostage until Ryan easily bamboozles him into getting trapped in a cargo container that he ejects into space and blasts the Enterprise with a surprise attack, taking off at warp.
Embarrassing. Absolutely Embarrassing.
Realizing they still have gosh, 20 minutes left in the episode, the blast has temporarily stalled Enterprise and knocked out her long range sensors. Ryan is going to use codes he's beaten out of a prisoner to go Full Ahab on the Nausicaans because his family was killed by them and he switched ships and the Nausicaans have injured his replacement father. His torture isn't going very well and the Nausicaan insults his torture prowess and offers to give him some pointers, laughing his ass off. Embarrassing. Absolutely Embarrassing. Anyway, I'm sure you can trust the codes of the dude making fun of how you tortured him or indeed, anyone you tortured.
Meanwhile aboard Enterprise, they're having a D-Tier philosophical debate about whether Ryan should go after the Nausicaans or not.
See, Travis has suddenly gone all Castle Doctrine Free Grazer in the minutes before this saying Starfleet shouldn't boss these guys around. There are many logical responses to this.
This ain't one chief. Starfleet seems to engage in zero pirate suppression or merchant escorting. These guys have been dealing with this shit on their own. I think the bigger thing is: Ryan has been torturing an enemy combatant, he might escalate the conflict with the Nausicaans dragging other tribes into it, but more likely he's going to absolutely get owned.
Uh oh, we've triggered the Word of The Day and gotten me Back On My Bullshit and I have to reference Lancer:
Archer again believes in only a single human culture that he is the arbiter of. Archer could say they've violated what he feels is right or he's worried about the implications of their actions or fallout from them, or even just the lives of everyone involved. But no, by being Human they are subject to what he thinks they should do and he's worried they're going to hurt the Nausicaans. There are no cultural differences, no different philosophies, no differing opinions on how to handle things. They have to follow the immutable rules of humanity. No wonder the Klingons called the Federation a "Homo Sapiens Only Club", this is the guy who gets it started! I'm going to get into this later but I don't even know who the fuck these freighter guys are really under or how they work or anything like that, because the writers don't seem to know. They're a part of "Earth Cargo Services" under the "Earth Cargo Authority" and none of this shit seems to have gotten defined that well. There's apparently a deleted line saying he's violating ECS regulations but can Archer enforce ECA rules? What's the relationship between these two? You fuckers needed to eat your god damn vegetables and do some world building across some episodes before you spent a single episode on these guys and no more for three years. Ryan accuses Travis of trying to "recruit" him and there's some frankly bizarre lines later, so I don't think Archer has the authority here. Except for the authority granted to him by the immutable, hard coded morals of humanity encased within its genome, subject to no situational, cultural or philosophical considerations.
Also Archer could maybe, I dunno, do something about the piracy? You have full construction specifications for Phase Cannons on your ship which would make this thing an absolute dreadnaught against Nausicaan ships and able to easily defend itself. The Nausicaans stand no chance against Enterprise even without that upgrade so you could easily do punitive actions in the place of Ryan. Ryan is Full Ahab and so he's a danger to his crew but the problem remains.
Anyway, it turned out his hostage lied to him and he's getting absolutely owned by Nausicaans who want their hostage back and have boarded the absolutely disabled Fortunate to get him back. Archer shows up to be ineffectual:
Lol. Lmao even. Normally when people act this passively against the Nausicaans they wake up to find themselves a Lieutenant JG, Assistant Astrophysics officer, but luckily for Archer, he can fall back to Argumentum Ad Reed
So now Travis gets a chance to make a grand speech to try to get Ryan to give up, saying that he's quite obviously endangering every other freighter out there since obviously Starfleet doesn't give a damn about protecting them and the Nausicaans are probably going to play even more hardball from here on out, and that he's gone full Ahab. Oh yeah and that they're obviously fucking losing this fight and the Nausicaans are just going to fucking kill you, idiot. This immediately resolves the plot and we cut to the real captain waking up and saying he's demoting Ryan for almost getting everyone killed.
Oh, so they're actually just literally Boomers. Great.
I'm sorry, stay in business? This is a business? How. Do you own this ship? What does the ECS do? Are you an Independent Contractor and Owner Operator? What the fuck is going on with Enterprise. Why isn't providing human colonies with supplies a state business? You're supposed to have gotten past this shit by now! Do you have a loan from a bank on this thing?!
Again, not much would change and if you are that obsessed with spending years on a ship, you can always just go farther out with newer ships. If you own them. Which we don't know.
I'm tired, so very tired. Next up, we're going to do a little rearranging and do the Reed episode next. Unfortunately he doesn't even get to have an episode to himself, but what can you do?
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- Patriarchova
A dumb action plot about taking out a nausicaan pirate base would have been better than this.
Well done mindless action episodes are much more fun and usually a lot less cringy than attempts at a "deep" episode that miss the mark. Especially this badly.
Enterprise had a lot of cringe.
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- He/Him
So much potential wasted. Here we have people who are born, live, and die on the same ship for generations. Their choice being to only interact with those outside their ship for trade and other necessities. We should be seeing cultural drift as they pass on traditions different from everyone else. Space Roma or Space hillbillies, take your pick.
One way they could do it is have them be a subcultures of humanity who would willingly do this to keep their culture free of contamination or subjugation from others(akin to, or ancestors of, all those cultural isolationists we see settle Federation colonies in TNG), and how they're wary of outsiders. Naturally such a crew would be dubious about Starfleet asking to upgrade everything to ensure their survival, because for them, the sins of the governments around the 21st century and earlier would be deeply etched in their culture. You'd have to use a RL minority culture, and that requires research, but it would be interesting.
Then their paranoia makes sense, and why they keep a distance from everyone else, because of how they've been shafted in the past.
Or, develop how these Boomers have their own folk songs, traditions, beliefs, etc. Maybe they've adopted a tradition of recycling bodies into fertilizer for their oxygen and agriculture gardens or something. It would make Trip or Reed uncomfortable, but Mayweather would explain that it grew out of necessity of not wanting to waste what you had, and it was better than cannibalism or starving.
Also, yeah, Archer doesn't want to stop pirates, because the writers forget that this isn't the 24th century where the Federation has treaties and agreements with almost everyone and peace is everywhere, this is the era in which humanity are establishing themselves in space, and should be making sure that they aren't easy targets for any criminals seeking out easy prey.
One way they could do it is have them be a subcultures of humanity who would willingly do this to keep their culture free of contamination or subjugation from others(akin to, or ancestors of, all those cultural isolationists we see settle Federation colonies in TNG), and how they're wary of outsiders. Naturally such a crew would be dubious about Starfleet asking to upgrade everything to ensure their survival, because for them, the sins of the governments around the 21st century and earlier would be deeply etched in their culture. You'd have to use a RL minority culture, and that requires research, but it would be interesting.
Then their paranoia makes sense, and why they keep a distance from everyone else, because of how they've been shafted in the past.
Or, develop how these Boomers have their own folk songs, traditions, beliefs, etc. Maybe they've adopted a tradition of recycling bodies into fertilizer for their oxygen and agriculture gardens or something. It would make Trip or Reed uncomfortable, but Mayweather would explain that it grew out of necessity of not wanting to waste what you had, and it was better than cannibalism or starving.
Also, yeah, Archer doesn't want to stop pirates, because the writers forget that this isn't the 24th century where the Federation has treaties and agreements with almost everyone and peace is everywhere, this is the era in which humanity are establishing themselves in space, and should be making sure that they aren't easy targets for any criminals seeking out easy prey.
Or even Kirk's era of the Federation, they still had issues with Orion pirates and such.
slybrarian
Creature of Fable
- Location
- A Far and Sunless Land
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- He/Him
It really does try to ape all series like the Solar Queen, Alliance-Union, Liaden, and other classic free-trader stories without a clue about how they worked and why. There's a reason those all involved either long time-warped journeys or finding valuable routes that weren't serviced by big automated bulk haulers. It makes very little sense for these slow-ass ships to be out in the middle of nowhere (relative to Earth) on their own. Doing long-haul between Earth colonies and on space lanes where Starfleet or the Vulcans patrol? Yeah, that might work, but not as manned family ships. Robots or cold freeze crews there. Any kind of family-owned and operated ship should be hauling around high-value, low-volume goods at the fringes of Earth's known space, at a reasonably decent speed. It would make sense for them to be isolated from other humans while still stopping in regularly at alien ports of call. They could even be recurring characters in places where the rest of Starfleet hasn't reached yet!
Honestly it's not even clear what the boomers are hauling. Their holds are huge and empty! The Nausicaans, for their part, sure don't look like their ships have room for hundreds of thousands of tons of ore either.
Archer of course is just being almost-peak Archer. Hugely passive-aggressive about people shooting at pirates, when that should be one of Starfleet's main jobs outside of planetary defense, and moralizing about things he has no understanding of. Even 24th-century Picard showed he was perfectly willing to chase down and shoot Ferengi pirates or evil space archaeologists and he loves pontificating. I only say 'almost' because the episode with the Vulcan ambassador is even more insufferable.
Honestly it's not even clear what the boomers are hauling. Their holds are huge and empty! The Nausicaans, for their part, sure don't look like their ships have room for hundreds of thousands of tons of ore either.
Archer of course is just being almost-peak Archer. Hugely passive-aggressive about people shooting at pirates, when that should be one of Starfleet's main jobs outside of planetary defense, and moralizing about things he has no understanding of. Even 24th-century Picard showed he was perfectly willing to chase down and shoot Ferengi pirates or evil space archaeologists and he loves pontificating. I only say 'almost' because the episode with the Vulcan ambassador is even more insufferable.
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Yeah, this episode sounds like it raised a bunch of questions. Does Earth even have interstellar colonies (besides Terra Nova) in this period? Who are these "boomers" trading with? If they're trading with aliens, wouldn't more advanced e.g. Vulcan ships outcompete them by being much faster, or is almost everyone stuck poking around at such relatively low speeds in this time period?
If anything, from my impressions of it the problem with ENT is the opposite: they basically just took TNG/DS9/VOY era stuff, crossed out and replaced some words ("shields polarized hull plating"), nerfed some of the Treknology like transporters but not enough to fundamentally change the way stuff had to be written, and left it at that.
I wish they'd applied more imagination to making the twenty-second century feel like a different time period. Like, maybe space combat might look different, with a lot more emphasis on evasion and trying to shoot down the enemy's missiles before they hit you, because shields haven't been invented yet so spaceships are much more fragile.
Faster warp engines would have one potentially significant consequence: a lot more opportunities for people to leave the ship. That would potentially turn what they're doing from a whole lifeway into just a job; instead of people being born on the ship and spending their whole life there, most personnel become people doing five year contracts or something, with the result that much of the distinctiveness of the spacer culture is lost. There's potentially something in there about cultures that basically rely on "soft" forms of coercion like isolation to perpetuate themselves and how just giving people options can result in cultures like that basically being dissolved through defection and this may be feared and resisted by people who are invested in that culture.
I'm pretty OK with implication that twenty-second century Earth society is a lot more like ours than TOS or TNG era Federation society; it makes sense that society would change in a century, and it makes the setting feel less homogenous and less static.
If anything, from my impressions of it the problem with ENT is the opposite: they basically just took TNG/DS9/VOY era stuff, crossed out and replaced some words ("
I wish they'd applied more imagination to making the twenty-second century feel like a different time period. Like, maybe space combat might look different, with a lot more emphasis on evasion and trying to shoot down the enemy's missiles before they hit you, because shields haven't been invented yet so spaceships are much more fragile.
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Athene
Rise for the Shadow Queen
- Location
- Dream of The 90s
- Pronouns
- She/Her
They mention a "Vega Colony to Draylax" route so we know Vega Colony exists at this point.
Athene
Rise for the Shadow Queen
- Location
- Dream of The 90s
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Speaking of introducing monetary concerns where they have no business, I have to post this because I've had to buy a bunch of tools and professional supplies and rent is coming up.
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This felt a lot fresher when I was five and hadn't watched Cowboy Bebop's fucking amazing trucker episode. That said it also made no sense to five year old me cause trucker culture in the UK is very different from the USA trucker culture this episode is based on.
Star Trek in these years (late VOY to ENT) really was good in spite ofRick Berman itself huh?
Star Trek in these years (late VOY to ENT) really was good in spite of
dhasenan
always lowercase
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Humanity seems to have remarkably little contact with other species. The Vulcans appear to be managing them as a client state, which might explain why the Enterprise doesn't even have an ambassador on board.
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- California
The captain being the ambassador is just Star Trek tradition.
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- Patriarchova
The weirdness of how the truckers were portrayed in this episode just baffled me at the time. Now that you point it out, yeah, it's obvious that the writers were trying to emulate a different genre of scifi without realizing why it made no sense at all in Trek.
slybrarian
Creature of Fable
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I wouldn't say it makes no sense in Trek, just that it makes no sense as presented. Trek has always had various small tramp freighters running around hauling stuff. (When specified it's usually things like biological, specialized machinery, high-density high-value minerals, and the like.) You could totally drop the Solar Queen into the setting just fine, for example. That's basically Cassidy Yates.
If anything, the 22nd century is the perfect place for that kind of ship. There's no replicators and much less well-established trade links that can be handled by routine robotic freighter or high-speed liner. The Boomers would have been one of humanity's key means of learning about their alien neighbors and exploring space where Starfleet couldn't afford to go yet. (Whether you call it money or not, there's some method of deciding what gets resources.) Forrest should be very concerned if there's an upswing in pirate attacks on Earth ships because that leaves them blind and may limit their ability to get around Vulcan technology restrictions by acquiring stuff elsewhere, and Archer even as an engineer-focused officer should be aware of the need to balance booping the Nausicaans firmly on the snoot to establish dominance and not letting a vengence-driven space trucker drag Earth into an interstellar incident that might affect everyone else. The freighter culture could still be afraid of losing their distinction as being the only humans out in 'unexplored' space, and the prestige that comes with it, now that Starfleet suddenly has a Warp 5 cruiser capable of zipping across long distances, as well internal cultural changes. New warp engines have a tradeoff between "we can finally outbid those Tellarites" versus "United Earth is suddenly all up in our business" versus "United Earth is suddenly putting a phase cannon in the Nausicaans' business", Travis could be literally anything other than Travis.
If anything, the 22nd century is the perfect place for that kind of ship. There's no replicators and much less well-established trade links that can be handled by routine robotic freighter or high-speed liner. The Boomers would have been one of humanity's key means of learning about their alien neighbors and exploring space where Starfleet couldn't afford to go yet. (Whether you call it money or not, there's some method of deciding what gets resources.) Forrest should be very concerned if there's an upswing in pirate attacks on Earth ships because that leaves them blind and may limit their ability to get around Vulcan technology restrictions by acquiring stuff elsewhere, and Archer even as an engineer-focused officer should be aware of the need to balance booping the Nausicaans firmly on the snoot to establish dominance and not letting a vengence-driven space trucker drag Earth into an interstellar incident that might affect everyone else. The freighter culture could still be afraid of losing their distinction as being the only humans out in 'unexplored' space, and the prestige that comes with it, now that Starfleet suddenly has a Warp 5 cruiser capable of zipping across long distances, as well internal cultural changes. New warp engines have a tradeoff between "we can finally outbid those Tellarites" versus "United Earth is suddenly all up in our business" versus "United Earth is suddenly putting a phase cannon in the Nausicaans' business", Travis could be literally anything other than Travis.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
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- Somewhere Offscreen
Not only that, but in the episode A Night In Sickbay, Tucker says that Archer is "a trained diplomat."
Keep in mind that this is in the context of an episode where Archer has caused an international incident by bringing his dog with him to meet with alien dignitaries and said dog then peed on their sacred trees, and Archer is blaming the aliens for the fact that his dog got sick on their planet and threatening to pee on their trees himself.
"Trained diplomat."
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
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- AZ
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even all these years
even all these years later it just shits me that
they took a concept as simple as 'protect the civilian freighters from marauding pirates'
and they
they
they made the Had It Up To Here freighter crew the bad guys
all you had to do was have the Enterprise come flying to defend a damaged freighter and then like
idfk use the big ship to obscure the Enterprise while you fly up to the pirate base and dunk it
just pretend to be master and commander in space for forty minutes fuck
and travis looks into the camera and says 'maybe someday we'll be able to make peace and people can travel anywhere in safety that would be great for starfleet's ideals'
even all these years later it just shits me that
they took a concept as simple as 'protect the civilian freighters from marauding pirates'
and they
they
they made the Had It Up To Here freighter crew the bad guys
all you had to do was have the Enterprise come flying to defend a damaged freighter and then like
idfk use the big ship to obscure the Enterprise while you fly up to the pirate base and dunk it
just pretend to be master and commander in space for forty minutes fuck
and travis looks into the camera and says 'maybe someday we'll be able to make peace and people can travel anywhere in safety that would be great for starfleet's ideals'
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- Patriarchova
Heck, if you want to do the "I clapped, I clapped when I saw it!" thing with a species from later in Trek, and you also want to emphasize the fact that humanity is a minor power in a dangerous, lawless region of space...
The nausicaans could have been the main season one baddies.
They have enough of a tech advantage over the humans to be a real combat threat, but they're also a bunch of disunified pirate tribes who can be individually outmanoeuvred or played against one another. Since they're preying on humanity's nascent space logistics train, they SHOULD logically also be a major barrier to continued expansion and exploration that really needs to be dealt with before we can get to the proto-Federation stage, and Starfleet doing some dedicated pirate-hunting might also open diplomatic doors with the nausicaans' other victims and lead to other plot arcs.
They could have also been a natural lead-in to the next arc villain(s). Beta canon has the nausicaans as a klingon client/subject race, so pushing back against the pirates might eventually lead us to klingon space. Alternatively, maybe the pirates have been selling their ill-gotten gains to the Orion Syndicate, and eventually the orions themselves start retaliating against Starfleet.
But no. The writers couldn't get out of the headspace of the TNG era. Criminals and pirates are just nonthreatening one-off villains of the week, and the main plot is about not being in this time period. :/
The nausicaans could have been the main season one baddies.
They have enough of a tech advantage over the humans to be a real combat threat, but they're also a bunch of disunified pirate tribes who can be individually outmanoeuvred or played against one another. Since they're preying on humanity's nascent space logistics train, they SHOULD logically also be a major barrier to continued expansion and exploration that really needs to be dealt with before we can get to the proto-Federation stage, and Starfleet doing some dedicated pirate-hunting might also open diplomatic doors with the nausicaans' other victims and lead to other plot arcs.
They could have also been a natural lead-in to the next arc villain(s). Beta canon has the nausicaans as a klingon client/subject race, so pushing back against the pirates might eventually lead us to klingon space. Alternatively, maybe the pirates have been selling their ill-gotten gains to the Orion Syndicate, and eventually the orions themselves start retaliating against Starfleet.
But no. The writers couldn't get out of the headspace of the TNG era. Criminals and pirates are just nonthreatening one-off villains of the week, and the main plot is about not being in this time period. :/
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IofTheBunny
✧:*AngeryOpossum*:✧
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Oh dear.
Humanity in this trek feels like a player of Lasers and Feelings who somehow managed to roll a potato stat on chargen.
Humanity in this trek feels like a player of Lasers and Feelings who somehow managed to roll a potato stat on chargen.