Enterprise 3x11 "Carpenter Street"

rating: ***

the story: Xindi-Reptilians attempt to engineer a bio-weapon in Earth's past.

what it's all about: Episodes set in the current day tend to feel like money-savers.  The original series did it first, naturally, only to do it again in the movies with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and eventually Voyager did it, too, the Bill Gates-evoking "Future's End" two-parter.  "Carpenter Street" at first glance looks like a waste of such an opportunity, but it really isn't.

It's actually got a lot going on.  The most convenient angle, and probably what ultimately made the Temporal Cold War look most like a cheap gimmick, was using Daniels mostly as a kind of time-traveling cab driver (although that would be a fantastic gimmick!), bringing Archer and T'Pol to the exact moment they need to thwart the latest Xindi plan.  "Thwart the latest Xindi plan" sounds as bad as trivializing Daniels, but it's actually the second best thing about the episode.  Or best, depending how much you like the next thing I'm going to talk about.

The present day (2004) is represented mostly at night, and by a scuzzball whose major contribution to showing Archer and T'Pol what 2004 looks like is having them bring him to the drive-thru of a fast food restaurant.  We'd already seen this guy scarfing down delivery pizza.  The drive-thru scene is classic, especially as T'Pol clearly wants no part of it, right around the time when our real world culture was transitioning away from taking fast food burgers for granted and seeking healthier alternatives.  Yet this guy lives on the stuff!  Take everything else out of the story, and having our future characters experience the present this way...absolutely perfect.

But the scuzzball is also unwittingly a pawn of a Xindi faction.  Up till now, the various Xindi species hadn't really distinguished themselves.  "The Shipment" had focused on a Xindi-Sloth, and we'd begun to suspect that Xindi-Humanoid Degra was probably going to be more important than he seemed.  What about the others?  Were any of them truly nasty?  "Carpenter Street" answers that in a big way, and also foreshadows the later truly nasty turn the Xindi-Reptilians take.  The Walking Dead's infamous bat-swinging Negan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, plays one of them, and apparently seriously contemplated quitting acting because he hated the prosthetics process.  I know some characters who would've been happy if he had...!  But it also sucks that Star Trek actually had Morgan in an episode, and we didn't even get to see his face.  In the words of McCoy (circa Star Trek Beyond), "Typical."

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The tradition of visiting the present day maintained.
• series - Yet it actually proves incredibly relevant in hindsight.
• character - Daniels, and the whole Temporal Cold War, kind of feels sabotaged.
• essential - The drive-thru scene is a classic.  And prescient!

notable guest-stars:
Jeffrey Dean Morgan
Leland Orser
Matt Winston (Daniels)

Deep Space Nine 3x21 "The Die Is Cast"

rating: ****

the story: A joint Romulan/Cardassian war party enters the Gamma Quadrant as Garak's betrayal continues to sink in.

what it's all about: Where "Sins of the Father" sowed the seeds of a continuing Klingon arc in Next Generation, famously, the exact moment Deep Space Nine transitioned from episodic to serialized storytelling, which eventually became its trademark, is far harder to determine.  One might argue the general introduction of Winn in the first season finale, "In the Hands of the Prophets," or the Dominion in the second season finale, "The Jem'Hadar," but the later Dominion War that became the hallmark of the series really owes its greatest debt to the two-part "Improbable Cause"/"The Die Is Cast," in which the Alpha Quadrant actually declares war on the Gamma Quadrant first.  This was an arc that had quite a few claims to a beginning (the most obvious ones would be "Defiant," where we first learn about a secret Cardassian fleet, or "The Wire," in which we learn a little of Garak's mysterious past in a Cardassian espionage ring called the Obsidian Order), but if you really want to pin the origin of the series as it became known, you'd probably want to settle on "The Die Is Cast."

Yes, it continues the story from "Improbable Cause," which concludes with Garak betraying his friends aboard the station and reuniting with his old mentor (and father) Enabran Tain.  Before this (and after) Garak was best known for his incredibly ambiguous presence in the series, in some ways the very heart of a series that came to be defined by its ambiguousness, never comfortable with the much more definite conclusions found in most other corners of Star Trek as a whole.  If Garak was never a main character, he stood at the forefront of a rich cast of supporting characters, who when he did appear always had something worthwhile to do, and never moreso than in "Die Is Cast," the one moment in the series he flirts with being unambiguous, a suitably villainous Cardassian at last.

This is ironic, because this was the season the Cardassians took a turn for the friendly, something that would sit just as uncomfortably as it seems even now, until the fifth season when they joined the Dominion and thereby officially ushered in the war that would encompass the rest of the series.  Only the unabashed heroic reversal of Damar would ever truly and permanently redeem them.

No, Garak was never a hero, but when the sequence that defines this episode finally begins, you begin to see just how unique he really is in Star Trek.  He tortures Odo.  It's horrible.  I mean, torture is always horrible, but until The Passion of the Christ I would never again see anything approaching what Garak does to Odo in this episode.  In some ways, though, it's directly responsible for crystalizing the third season's efforts to bring out the best of the series, and the incredible depths it would explore later.  When we discover the torturer has no taste for his art, that he desperately wants Odo to give him something, anything, so he can stop, because he genuinely does want to stop, we learn that the lie wasn't to his friends, the lie was to himself, and the cost was too great to further pursue.  In the end, like Next Generation's answer to why Picard means so much to Guinan ("Time's Arrow"), it's such an obvious conclusion it still seems impossible: Garak is a good person who was asked once too often to be something else, and it nearly broke him. 

We would see echoes of this conclusion later, but in no greater form than in this episode.  And why is the war the defining element of the series?  For the same reason.  Garak's torture forces Odo to admit, for the first time, that he yearns to return to his people, the Founders, who run the Dominion.  This is itself an act of betrayal, and that's why Odo fights so hard to suppress this desire, and yet it's a pure one despite how others might interpret it, and that's why Garak finds in him a kindred soul, something pure that exists in the midst of something awful, such an inexplicable existence and yet this is a series jam-packed with such individuals, broken lives struggling for redemption (the parallels with Lost are why I found that series so hugely rewarding, too).  People remember the war.  Well, this is where it begins, and everyone's implicated, even Starfleet: it was Starfleet's decision to partner with the Romulans in the acquisition of a cloaking device for the Defiant that emboldened the Romulans in the first place.  This is why the war happens, not because of anything else prior to "Die Is Cast," certainly not the what-if scenario of the season premiere, "The Search," which for everything it helped set up still exhibited safe storytelling, compared to the pipe bomb of this episode, but for the direct provocation everyone all but willed to happen.  For the first and only time in franchise history, war is declared inevitable, a crucible in which truth finally stands revealed. 

This is exactly where you look to see what the whole series was about.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - War! What is it good for?
• series - Well before the Dominion War itself begins, this is where it began.
• character - Where we finally find out the truth about Garak.
• essential - For the torture sequence alone, this is a classic.

notable guest-stars:
Andrew Robinson (Garak)
Paul Dooley (Tain)
Leland Orser
Ken Marshall (Eddington)

Deep Space Nine 2x10 "Sanctuary"

rating: *

the story: Refugee aliens from the Gamma Quadrant claim Bajor is their home of destiny.

what it's all about: Well, "Sanctuary" is about as awkward an episode as you'll find in the whole of the franchise.  In short, this is because it's a one-and-done episode that seeks to read as an analogy to the State of Israel, but this is really hard to pull off because it puts the whole concept of Bajor into complicated knots the story is not nearly prepared to answer.

Simply put, the analogy is too simple, and it undermines everything the series had previously tried and would continue try doing with Bajor, itself a victim world in ways that are not wholly compatible with the realities of the Middle East, certainly not so I can summarize them here and that "Sanctuary" itself adequately explores.  I'll give the episode one star for making the attempt, but otherwise it's probably best to be considered a huge mess.

Not the least, again, because it has no relevance to the rest of the series, without even a single major Bajoran appearing in it aside from series regular Kira, which for a story like this is just plain unacceptable and would never have happened later.  Simply put, this is an episode that better deserves to exist in the first season, if it really needs to exist at all, when something like these omissions were more common, because the series simply hadn't developed enough of its mythology to accommodate such storytelling.  And yet by this point, there had been several prominent Bajorans developed, as seen just a few episodes earlier.

The very strangest thing is that "Sanctuary" does portend the later Dominion arc, officially begun in the season finale, and so it actually stands as an episode of minor significance, which just makes the oversights, which scream in hindsight, so much harder to overlook.  When you ask the viewer to think of the Bajorans as the enemy, not because of some fringe movement as in the three-part season premiere, but as people incapable of assimilating desperate refugees who in many ways mirror them, it stretches incredulity too much.

If not for that attempt at analogy, this would be a very easy candidate for worst episode of the series.  Actually, that analogy, and how badly it's botched, might actually make things worse.  But I will at least make it possible for other opinions on the core concept to remain as a valid reason to watch it.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - As analogy for the State of Israel, it's worth a look.
• series - But not for fans of the series.
• character - Or for fans of the characters.
• essential - Or anyone who likes their storytelling good.

notable guest-stars:
Leland Orser

Voyager 4x5 "Revulsion"

**

The nature of the Doctor as an artificial life-form was a dominant feature of not only the character but the series, something some fans liked to compare with Data from Next Generation. Yet I would argue that Voyager did more to seriously explore this than its predecessor, making it one of the elements I like to point to when trying to make the argument that the series deserves more respect than it generally gets.

In this episode, the Doctor runs into a Delta Quadrant hologram who metaphorically suggests that he could stand to get a little more respect from his own crew, because in the worst case scenario he could easily become taken for granted (and become homicidal!).

"Revulsion" is certainly episodic, not planting any obvious seeds for future stories, but it's a good reminder of what you can expect from even the most average Doctor entry. In short, he's another key member of the Voyager ensemble, easily the one the show's creators tended to support most consistently.

Franchise * Series * Essential * Character

Notable guest-stars:
Leland Orser

Memory Alpha summary.