Enterprise 1x23 "Fallen Hero"

rating: ***

the story: An embattled Vulcan ambassador requires rescuing.

what it's all about: Sometimes a bad situation stays bad because there's never a breakthrough in communications.  That's the thing about Enterprise.  It posits a relationship between humans and Vulcans that's a bad situation, because Vulcans find humans primitive.  Anyone who saw Star Trek: First Contact knows humans were certainly in a bad place when they first met.  It shouldn't be surprising.  Cochrane certainly wasn't a "great man" until history started making its judgments.  It definitely seemed to help, not only his achievement but his engine becoming so important; the Cochrane we glimpse in "Broken Bow" is a lot more civil than the one in First Contact. 

Anyway, so despite that warm fuzzy moment at the end of the movie when we see the Vulcan remove his hood, relations themselves weren't automatically warm and fuzzy.  That was merely a cathartic moment speaking for itself, after a tumultuous experience battling the Borg and making sure Cochrane's flight happened at all.  Not only does it attract the attention of an alien ship, but it's Vulcan, and it feels like the birth of the future in a snapshot.  But nothing's ever that simple.  Vulcans ultimately find these human upstarts primitive.  And I say again, is that really so surprising?  The only surprise is the depth and persistence, but again, a bad situation tends to stay bad until there's a breakthrough, and Enterprise is all about making breakthroughs.

"Fallen Hero" doesn't seem like it's a breakthrough story.  There are a lot of breakthrough stories in the first season, and subsequent ones.  But ultimately, it is.  It's the first time the crew encounters a friendly Vulcan, someone who will take them at face value rather than history or cultural development.  The crew helps the ambassador out of a sticky situation, and that does the trick.  It begins to thaw a sticky situation.  Ironically, it's very similar to a couple of experiences with Klingons earlier in the season, and yet the results are the complete opposite.  That should be telling.

Somewhat more intriguingly, however, is the plot itself, why the ambassador is in a tricky situation.  It's politics.  There was plenty of Klingon politics in Next Generation, and plenty of Bajoran and Cardassian politics in Deep Space Nine, but I think "Fallen Hero" still manages to mine new franchise territory.  The Vulcan ambassador's situation turns out to be that her reputation has purposely been smeared for political expediency.  The idea practically is politics, certainly politics as it's been practiced by Americans for over two hundred years.  It's ridiculously petty, but it seems to work every time.  This is an episode that seeks to point out the stupidity of it.  Later, "Judgment" sort of echoes this lesson, with a Klingon.  Irony.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Insight into the eventual thaw of human/Vulcan relations.
• series - Another example of how Archer makes bridges.
• character - The thrust of the episode is more the experience of it than a spotlight on Archer or T'Pol, or even the ambassador.
• essential - Intriguing insight into the pettiness of politics.

notable guest-stars:
Fionnula Flanagan
Vaughn Armstrong (Forrest)

The Next Generation 7x10 "Inheritance"

rating: ***

the story: Data meets his "mother."

what it's all about: This late-series addition to Data's backstory is a fascinating one, which maybe would have been better if it'd happened earlier.  You can bet that if this had been Deep Space Nine, we would've seen Noonien Soong's wife a few more times at least.

So it turns out Soong, the man who created Data, Lore, and B4 (whom we don't meet and/or know about until Star Trek Nemesis), also transferred his wife's consciousness into an android body.  This is a wonderful Next Generation echo of far more blunt moments from the original series ("What Are Little Girls Made Of?," for instance), and even from its own past ("The Survivors"). If "Inheritance" has a quieter legacy, it's because the story around what really matters is about as generic as the series could get.  It's still a step up from "Interface" earlier in the season, though, and a clear sign that the season had begun to find its footing.

Data was a remarkably rich character to explore.  Whether his quest in the present to become more human, or his origins, there was always great material to be found.  To consider it as something that could easily have consumed the entire series (Data was probably inspired by Gene Roddenberry's failed pilot concept, The Questor Tapes, which did star an android, played by later Trek alum Robert Foxworth) is to wonder how any other in the series ever managed to compete with him.  He even had the season premiere to resolve another aspect of his story, the matter of Lore and the emotions he'd stolen from Soong that were meant for Data.

That was a thorny story, and didn't in the end add anything new.  It was so obvious there was nowhere left to go with Lore the episode ended with Data switching him off!  So to have another android, one who apparently was the most sophisticated android Soong ever created, is something worth considering.

Soong had a human prototype to work with.  For the androids everyone knows he created, he merely used himself as a visual aide, and created everything else from the ground up.  For Tainer, he had an actual person.  From other episodes we already know Soong could program the memories of individuals into Data.  It's not so unreasonable to assume he could imprint Tainer's directly into a positronic net, so that the android believed it was Tainer.

That's the story, right there, Tainer not realizing what she is, but Data figuring it out.  It's perhaps one of his most human moments in the whole series, not one where he was forced to pass judgment on someone, but in the grand tradition of the series let the moral ambiguity work itself out.  Soong programmed the Tainer android to live a natural lifespan.  She never needed to find out, and Data decides it's just as well that way.

Soong was full of secrets.  What made him such a maddening genius was that those secrets had a way of revealing themselves without warning.  Tainer was the best of them, and "Inheritance" is a happy experience for it. 

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Smart, subtle echoes to franchise lore.
• series - In its basic structure reflects poorly on the creativity of the series.
• character - Works wonders for Data, however.
• essential - It adds a nice flavor to his backstory.

notable guest-stars:
Fionnula Flanagan (Tainer)