Shadows Of P'Jem
Given it was the stated intent of this series when I began it, it’s been rather a long time since I last really compared two episodes against each other.
A lot of the time, that’s simply because it feels unnecessary. I don’t think I need to explicitly state I thought watching the hyper-tense back and forth of “Balance of Terror” pleased me more than sitting through than the atomic apologia of “Jetrel”. Just as often, my preferences have nothing in the way of interesting thinking behind them – I’m just deciding, given the choice, which episode I would rather watch again.
Not this time, though. Here, the ordering is both easy and of at least some small interest. On the one hand,”Shadows Of P’Jem” lacks the strong character work and interesting subtext of “Balance of Terror” and “Progress”. On the other, it is mercifully free of the various major problems that quickly sink “11001001” and “Jetrel”. That just leaves “The Slaver Weapon” to compare it to. Putting the two side-by-side is rather instructive. Both of them sit squarely in that most undistinguished category of “episodes you need to be reminded exist”. They earn that particular label in very different ways, though. Niven’s animated offering was a classic example of an episode doing the absolute bare minimum. It set itself a bar so low it essentially couldn’t help but be cleared.
“Shadows Of P’Jem”, in contrast, is trying for something at least a little more ambitious – winding-up four different groups and letting them crash into each other, all against a backdrop of interstellar realpolitik. On paper (on PADD?), that sounds very much like my sort of thing. So where did it all go wrong?
Fundamentally, the problem is that moral complexity isn’t actually the same as everybody yelling.
“We Periodically Negotiate With Terrorists”
As my framing above suggests, not everything here is bad. There are good ideas to be found, or at least to be briefly glimpsed as they struggle to reach the surface. The basic set-up is sound: the Vulcans come into conflict with three very different other races (Andorians, Coridans, and humans), each of which has their own reasons for not being inclined to go along with the decisions of High Command. There’s something very Trek about watching our heroes zip around the galaxy and taking issue with the ostensibly benevolent culture which dominates the surrounding space. TNG and DS9 both used to do that all the time, after all, though admittedly the separation of Enterprise’s human crew from that culture complicates the narrative somewhat, and likely not to the show’s credit.
Either way, though, it’s a smart idea to have the Vulcans react as though the pertinent issue here is the fact Archer and crew keep exposing the problems caused by them running the table, rather than the actual problems themselves. It’s a classic example of those in power labelling others as troublemakers, when it would be fairer to call them troublerevealers. The implication that the High Command are much more interested in keeping everything quiet than actually listening to anyone’s gripes fits rather well with my insistence that Vulcan would be more accurately named Planet of the Well, Actuallys.
I know, I know. I promised not to dip into this particular well for a little while. It’s hard to keep to that when the episode in question is so determined to dive into it headfirst, though. Which is where the problems start. Swiping at the Vulcans for insisting their philosophy is objectively correct is both right and proper. But it’s hard to keep sight of that critique among the avalanche of petty dickishness the Vulcans are allowed to display here.
I don’t know how much of Sussman and Strong’s script came directly from Berman and Braga, but the end result is hyperbolic in its contempt for Vulcans. By this point the snide arrogance of characters like Sopek have reached cartoonish levels. It’s one thing to be a jerk over dinner, but Sopek shows his arse at every opportunity, making already bad enough situations needlessly worse. I mentioned all the way back at “Broken Bow” that the Vulcans would clearly rather upset humans than get what they actually want, but the urgency of the situation here makes that preference particularly aggravating.
But don’t I hate Vulcans? Shouldn’t this full court press in presenting them as indelible pit-stains should be right up my aesthetic alley? Well, no. Less, in this case, is decidedly more.bThe decision to make Sopek an omnidirectional git rather distracts from any attempt to actually mount a focused criticism. He represents a straw-Vulcan, one so shoddily constructed that its display becomes the problem, rather than the attitudes of those it claims to represent. in addition, the need to have him be in the wrong at all times and in all circumstances warps the situation – and more importantly, the main characters – into ridiculous shapes. When Reed notes they have no reason to trust the hostage-takers, or even to fulfil their demands if they wanted to, Trip nods along. When Sopek announces there is no sense in negotiating, though, Trip becomes apoplectic.
It’s blindingly obvious that Trip isn’t making any sense here, even before he accuses Sopek of secretly seeing an advantage in “accidentally” getting the hostages killed. But somehow the episode misses it, simply taking it as read that any position Sopek takes must be the wrong call. This is particularly baffling given how easily the argument could have been tweaked to be about who leads/participates in the rescue mission that genuinely seems to be the only option. But no. Sopek doesn’t want to negotiate, therefore negotiation must suddenly be the best idea in the local system.
Diminishing Returns
This argument between Sopek and Tucker is probably the nadir of the episode, but it’s an annoyingly representative one. Perhaps the intent was to suggest the importance of recognising when bad people have good ideas (a moral about which – surprise! – I have mixed feelings). But there’s too much else going on here for the idea to land. A story juggling four different factions was always going to struggle to sufficiently flesh out the relationships between them – four factions means six pairings, and there’s the T’Pol subplot to work in too – and “Shadows Of P’Jem” doesn’t really seem minded to try. I’ve talked already how the interactions between the Vulcans and Starfleet has devolved into “the Vulcans are always wrong”, but the Coridans are just as badly served. No context is offered for their internal conflict, rendering them faceless.
That’s something an episode can get away with when its coherent enough to allows the audience to fill in the blanks, but that’s not the case here. Are we supposed to dislike the kidnappers for attacking our heroes? Or are we supposed to sympathise with them because they claim they’re fighting a government propped up by the Vulcans? Ambiguity is one thing, but this is an absence, haunted by a contradiction.
There is I suppose another reading here, which is that we’re not supposed to be agreeing with anyone here. Both sides of the Coridan dispute are equally awful, as are the Vulcans, and – via Trip’s ludicrous “we MUST negotiate with terrorists!” outburst – Starfleet too, in its own way. That’s not particularly implausible, actually, but it doesn’t help matters. All it does is shift the episode into the sphere of the vulgar grimdark that ruined so much of millennial sci-fi, by mistaking antagonism and unpleasantness for realism and “grittiness”. There is a world of difference between no-one being flawless, and no-one being sympathetic.
We can slot the Andorians into this rotting framework, too. Pretty much the nicest thing I can think to say about Shran at this point in time is that Jeffrey Coombs excels so well in playing charismatic bastards, only bothering to put the “bastard” half of that formulation in the actual scripts is enough for him to make it all work. Meanwhile, the only other Andorian to return here is Tholos – the guy who heavily implied he intended to rape T’Pol when she was his prisoner. The result is a four-way struggle in which it feels essentially nobody deserves to get what they want. That would be a problem at just about any time, but it’s particularly jarring in a franchise that used to work so hard to find the best in people.
Nor is that my only issue with the Andorians. It’s not surprising that they return here – from the title onward, this episode is clearly intended as a sequel to “The Andorian Incident”. It makes sense to bring back a couple of characters from the earlier story. The problem comes in expecting that to work as the only reason for Shran and Tholos to return. What are they actually doing on Corida? Have they been trailing the Enterprise waiting for a chance to help out? Are they making sure to be constantly nearby Sopek in case they get a chance to assassinate or abduct him (nodding at the latter idea would have been interesting, actually, given the Coridan’s actions)? Were they visiting the Coridan rebels as part of larger anti-Vulcan efforts? Did they tip off the revolutionaries specifically to manufacture a crisis that Shran could save Archer from and thereby satisfy the demands of honour?
That last theory might actually be my favourite, since it also explains how Traeg knew when and where the shuttlepod would be arriving (though oddly not who would be in it). The point though is that we have no idea. Interstellar space is, you know, notoriously not small, and yet fifty percent of all known Andorians pop up here completely without explanation, apparently because it’s enough to assume that the sequel to the show’s first Andorian story also needs Andorians in it.
On its own terms, this wouldn’t be worth more than a brief aside – I don’t want to be the kind of critic who simply rattles off lists of plot-holes, or worse, conflates the unexplained with the inexplicable because it’s easier than doing my job. But the decision to rely on the simple existence of “The Andorian Incident” as sufficient reason to see Shran and Tholos just serves as a reminder that there wasn’t really any justification for including the Andorians in that episode either.
Which means we’ve moved from the show’s already dicey idea that references to the franchise’s past can be used in place of actual ideas, and onto assuming references to its own past of using references from the past will work as well. It’s second-order hubris. “Wasn’t it great when we thought “wasn’t it great when”?” The problem with calling an episode “Shadows of P’Jem” is that the story introducing P’Jem in the first place wasn’t nearly bight enough to cast that long of a shadow.
And beyond all that, the episode even blows having Jeffrey Coombs return, because beyond underwriting Shran, he also isn’t given nearly enough to do. We get a story in which the Andorians are given a weight they don’t deserve, to help justify a sequel no-one wanted, and which manages to toss away the one actual positive this set-up could have given us.
I’m thinking the reasons for me placing this episode below “The Slaver Weapon” should be pretty clear at this point.
But there’s more to come, because we still haven’t really talked about T’Pol.
The Glass Bulkhead
Once again, there are definite positives we can lead in with. The basic idea of the Vulcans looking for a scapegoat for the destruction of P’Jem makes perfect sense. It’s another unavoidable corollary from the Vulcan fiction that objectively logical decision frameworks exist – the more you persuade yourself your decision process is unimpeachable, the greater the need to insist something else was at fault. It would be unthinkable for High Command to admit hiding an illegal listening post beneath a holy site might not have been a logical decision, and that requires the destruction of P’Jem be blamed on someone else.
It’s less clear why High Command choose to pin it on T’Pol, rather than just blaming Archer alone. The argument T’Pol was unsuccessful in preventing her captain from visiting P’Jem is entirely unconvincing, but more than that: it’s unnecessary. Far better, surely, to recall T’Pol and the Vulcan database to keep Starfleet from snooping around, but make it clear this is entirely on those meddling humans.
Whatever. My whole beef with the Vulcans is that their approach is bound to lead to terrible decisions. This one being particularly awful isn’t really a problem. In fact, it’s rather well-fashioned, insofar as it reflects something horribly familiar. Fundamentally, this is a story about a woman who faces the destruction of her career because the men higher up have messed everything up, and they figure they can save their own skins by scapegoating her. “Shadows Of P’Jem” comes close to playing a masterstroke by running this idea through the Vulcan lens. It’s not just that T’Pol is being screwed over by her male superior. It’s that the entirety of Vulcan society is designed around the idea that if she gets annoyed by the fact she’s about to be fired for no damn reason, it’ll be her who is acting inappropriately. Once again, the show reaches the point of recognising creating the franchise’s first female Vulcan regular allows for exploration of how forcing women into positions where they will be punished for displaying emotions ties much better into historical and contemporary issues, than it does when you do the same thing with a man.
Also once again, though, having come right up to being able to do something really interesting with it, Enterprise drops the ball. Having T’Pol struggle as she’s squeezed from two directions by workplace sexism would have had genuine potential as the focus of an episode. Deploying it as the b-plot to a standard action sci-fi runaround was never going to click. Even if it had been given the space it needed, though, we’d still run up against the fundamental issue with the show’s principal trio: Berman and Braga wanted to reference the original Kirk/Spock/McCoy trio, but they also wanted the two humans resentful of the Vulcans to the point of racism.
Even aside from the basic stupidity of deciding that what the Trek franchise needed was an injection of bigotry, (Gritty! Dark! Real!), the problem should have been obvious. T’Pol is forced by her society to ask removed and distant, sure, just as Spock was. But the guy whose role within the narrative was to help draw their friend out of that mode has been replaced by someone who just wants to sneer at their First Officer. This is how you get scenes like the one in the shuttlepod here, where Archer essentially gets frustrated because he doesn’t see why having labelled T’Pol as “one of the good ones” isn’t enough for T’Pol to want to confide in him.
In short, the tripod designed to hold the show aloft is irredeemably unstable, because you can’t actually help someone escape the toxic elements of their culture by constantly telling them their culture is a heap of crap. A grimdark Kirk/Spock/McCoy simply cannot work in anything approaching the way the originals did. And ultimately, this is the same problem I have with the Andorians. The show can’t work out what can be reused, and what has to be created anew.
It’s not that the showrunners don’t understand the importance of respecting and making use of the franchise’s history, while also ensuring it adapts and evolves as the years go by. It’s that they have no idea how to do either.
Plus, no orange space-cats. The prosecution rests.
Ordering
2. Progress
4. Shadows Of P’Jem
5. 11001001
6. Jetrel
Series Ordering (so far)
1. Deep Space Nine
2. Voyager
3. The Original Series
=4. The Animated Series
=4. The Next Generation
6. Enterprise
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