Enterprise Flashback: Exile

Star Trek will sometimes build an episode from the trappings of other story genres, reshaping them in a science-fiction mold. I was not a fan of the time Star Trek: The Next Generation took a run at Gothic romance... though enough time had passed that you can't blame them for trying again with Enterprise's "Exile."

Hoshi Sato is contacted telepathically by a reclusive alien who claims he can help the crew learn more about the Xindi. In exchange, he asks that she stay with him in his mountaintop castle as he works... though he intends to convince her to make that arrangement permanent. Meanwhile, Enterprise proceeds separately to a nearby sector where they may have located another of the mysterious spheres -- and learning more about it could be the key to understanding the region's strange anomalies.

"Exile" isn't just any old Gothic romance; it's rather specifically Beauty and the Beast. Tarquin, the "beast" of this story, is a monstrous figure who has been made an outcast. His abilities are tied to a strange artifact. Our female protagonist sees the potential for good in him... even though she stays in his secluded castle against her will. He gives her a book to get into her good graces. I find it all such an extreme one-to-one for Beauty and the Beast that the story suffers at all the points it can't follow the same plotting.

Because Hoshi is a main character on a television series, she can't actually fall in love with this guy, and certainly can't stay with him in the end. So the writers have to manufacture a reason they can't be together... and they land on making Tarquin terrible: a creep at best, a sexual predator at worst. His actions can easy be read as deception (he does not initially let her see his true appearance), gaslighting (he poses as people she knows, making her question reality), coercion (he tries to isolate her emotionally and physically from her friends), and assault (he reads her mind without permission). Plus, he's a serial offender; he wants to make Hoshi his fifth "companion."

Points to Hoshi for standing her ground, realizing when she's being tricked, and figuring out how to threaten him back to win her freedom. (And points to the writers for never really having her be tempted by his "offer.") But there's also no real story arc here for either character -- neither the "learning to see past the surface" moral of Beauty and the Beast, nor any substitute either. There's no hint that either one of them is going to be changed in the future for having encountered the other.

The B plot has its moments. The visual effects of the Enterprise hull liquefying and exploding are well executed. Archer and Trip nearly losing their ride while they're exploring the sphere is a fun scene. The revelation that the Delphic Expanse was artificially created feels like an intriguing twist -- even as the concurrent revelation that there may be 50 spheres or more suggests that our heroes still have a long way to go in solving their problems.

Other observations:

• In the opening scene, Hoshi's bathroom is weirdly laid out specifically for the camera. Only in TV land would a mirror NOT be positioned directly above a sink.

• In an episode featuring a villain who gaslights Hoshi, it's not great that both Reed and Phlox initially tell her she's probably imagining things.

• When Tarquin asks for an artifact important to the Xindi upon which to focus his telepathic abilities, it's a good thing we've already seen the proof that he is telepathic. That sounds like straight-up con artist stuff.

• The marginalizing of Travis Mayweather continues. In this episode, he's replaced at the helm in arbitrary scenes with a speechless, no-name pilot... even though there are other scenes where he does appear. also without saying a word.

• While Tarquin's telepathic powers are well established, it's completely unexplained what technology he possesses to actually threaten Enterprise at the end of the episode.

While Hoshi sticks up for herself in this episode, it's hardly what I'd call a "good Hoshi episode." Good moments for the Xindi arc overall are muddied with the pervasive ick factor of the alien Tarquin. Overall, I give "Exile" a C+.

Wild Assertions

The current entertainment pipeline often sees movies passing from theaters to streaming in a matter of weeks -- so even when you fall behind, you don't fall that far behind. But occasionally, we get a reminder of "the old days," when it would take many months for a movie to become watchable at home. I had almost forgotten that I wanted to watch the animated film The Wild Robot when it finally showed up on a streaming service.

The movie from DreamWorks Animation is based on the first of a series of children's books of the same title. In it, a robot abandoned in the wilderness comes online on an uninhabited island. In trying to fulfill her purpose to help, she befriends the local creatures, becomes mother to an orphaned goose... and ultimately attracts the attention of less-nurturing forces.

I enjoyed the movie overall, though I fear that praising it is going to come off as a series of backhanded compliments. For instance, one thing I really appreciated about The Wild Robot is how it doesn't try to push the boundaries of animation. These days, it seems like every animated movie is built around trying to pioneer some new way of rendering the most realistic animation you've ever seen. And while there is some clear effort put into the environments of this film (particularly in the extended forest fire sequence at the climax of the story), the character animation is refreshingly more simple.

I think this choice was perhaps forced on the production in at least two ways. One is that it's all based on a picture book. The movie is not trying to emulate the art directly -- it's not that basic. But I think those illustrations probably served as a reminder to streamline and simplify wherever possible. Secondly, I think all the talking animals of this story blocked off the possibility of too much hyper-realism -- at the same time that an abundance of pre-existing "talking animals movies" blocked off other ways you could have presented the characters. In order to chart its own course, distinct from Disney, Pixar, what-have-you, the movie needed to embrace a simpler animation style.

The story is sweet, with a few nice moments where the sentiment lands well. It is not the product of the well-oiled story machine that was Pixar in its heyday, nor Disney in its... though neither are Pixar and Disney themselves these days. The Wild Robot has some lovely things to say about found families, environmentalism, and more -- and that feels "good enough" even if it doesn't feel sharp enough to really tug on your emotions throughout.

The voice casting is the area where I can most unreservedly shine a spotlight. Lupita Nyong'o stars as the title character, deftly walking the tightrope of lending emotion to an ostensibly emotionless character. Surrounding her are Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, and Catherine O'Hara -- a deep bench of wonderful voices who lend pathos, comic relief, and texture to the world of the story.

Ultimately, I'd give The Wild Robot a B. That's not "can't miss" viewing, but I think it is good enough that just about anyone would find something to like in it, and find it worth the time.

Enterprise Flashback: Impulse

When Enterprise set up the idea of the Delphic Expanse, teasing us with the strange things that might happen there, they hit the audience with two specific "ghost stories" to sell the spookiness of the place: that the crew of one ship was turned inside out, and that an entire Vulcan crew was driven insane. Being a network show, they were never going to follow up and show us more about that first idea. But the second one takes center stage in "Impulse."

The Enterprise encounters a dense asteroid field, full of an element that can be used to protect the ship from the hazards of the Expanse. But as the crew makes plans to mine it, they discover a Vulcan ship adrift deep inside the field. When a team boards the ship, they find the entire crew compromised by an affliction that has turned them into rage-fueled monsters... a condition which begins to affect T'Pol.

"Impulse" is a straight-up horror episode, featuring Vulcan zombies. Boiled down that simply, it sounds pretty hokey -- though it's actually better than that, thanks in large part to the series' consistently high production values. Veteran Star Trek director David Livingston really leans into the stylistic shift, working with the production team to establish moody lighting, over-exposed film, arch camera angles, lots of fog, and superb makeup to give us a zombie story that legitimately honors the genre.

I do find myself wishing that there had been something a little more distinct about the fact that these are Vulcan zombies, some kind of Star Trek spin on the classic trope. (We don't even get that they're strong zombies, as they should be compared to the humans.) It's possible that what I'm really feeling is fatigue over the parade of zombie television in the decades since this episode was made. But if all this episode is going to do is "play the hits," it at least does so well -- zombies staggering inexorably toward the camera, clawing as people escape up a ladder, protruding through a barely-opened door... and all set against the ticking clock of an "infected" person slowly being turned. The episode even ends with "one last jump scare" as T'Pol has a nightmare about what she's been through.

But a huge measure of the tension is undercut by the "24 hours earlier" trope tacked on at the beginning of the episode. "Impulse" doesn't begin with the creeping dread of finding the Vulcan ship drifting in the asteroids; it begins with T'Pol already succumbing to zombie-ism, teasing us with the threat that she might die screaming on Phlox's Sickbay bed. (Jolene Blalock acts her ass off, full-on screaming into the camera... before we awkwardly smash cut to "it's been a long roooooad.....")

We know T'Pol isn't going to die here. But the show's insistence on teasing us with this schmuck bait compromises so many other aspects of the episode. We don't know the "zombie rules" going into this situation, but by showing us that teaser, we've been told that only T'Pol is at risk of "being turned"; we lose any tension that the humans on the mission might be threatened by "zombie bite." We've also seen exactly how bad T'Pol is going to get before arriving in Sickbay, which ultimately deflates any tension over how long the team might be trapped aboard the Vulcan ship. I'm hard-pressed to think of any horror movie that uses a flashback structure, and I'm pretty sure this is why: it just undercuts everything the genre is trying to do.

At this point, it's become comical how much this series hates several of its own characters. Travis Mayweather is involved (barely) in the B-plot about mining ore from an asteroid, but there's no possible justification for why he -- their best pilot -- didn't fly the shuttle to the Vulcan ship. (We just can't have him getting anywhere near the A-plot.) And just when you think nothing more can be said or shown about Reed's ineptitude as a tactical officer: Archer saves his life in a hand-to-hand fight with a zombie, and then later messes up "hotwiring" a console on the Vulcan ship, locking them out and angering T'Pol.

While I praised the horror-specific aspects of the production, I should still highlight that this episode is also good in many of the ways the series typically excels. We get the visuals of a super-dense and dangerous-looking asteroid field, a transporter accident that fuses rocks into the walls and floor, a shuttle crash on an asteroid, lingering shuttle damage, and a huge ship explosion. There's also multiple solid action sequences that involve fist fights, shoot-outs, crawling and climbing, and scurrying across a narrow beam over a chasm. Once again, this show does action well -- even if that unfortunate "24 hours earlier" tease has deflated much of the tension from it.

Other observations:

• This episode is something of an inversion of the earlier "Strange New World." There, an "infection" turned the humans against T'Pol; here, one turns T'Pol against the humans.

• For the larger Xindi story arc, we learn that the very ore which can protect the ship from the anomalies of the Expanse is toxic to Vulcans. T'Pol says Archer should leave her behind and protect the ship, but Archer says he can't save humanity by losing what makes him human. That would have been a better line if the Xindi arc hadn't taken Archer as far down the "Jack Bauer road" as it already has.

• As much as I hate the use of the "24 hours earlier" trope, they at least have the good sense not to repeat the same scenes when the flashbacks catch us back up to where the story began. 

• On movie night, Phlox once again talks during the film. (I guess the writers aren't willing to count him completely out of the "worst character on Enterprise" contest, despite the stiff competition.) T'Pol once again has a perfectly Vulcan way to shush hum.

I really love how Enterprise went for a horror movie here, and how far the behind-the-scenes team went to realize that vision. I'm disappointed in how much the writers let them down with a poor script structure and a lack of any "Trek-specific" spin on the zombie trope. Overall, I give "Impulse" a B-.

Enterprise Flashback: Rajiin

The first two seasons of Enterprise ran for 26 episodes. The third season dropped to 24 (one more reason I think they were chasing the hit show starring Kiefer Sutherland), but that's still a huge amount of story to provide for their long story arc about the Xindi. So much that inevitably, a few episodes were going to feel like "filler." That's where I'd put "Rajiin."

Enterprise travels to an alien market, where they buy information on how to synthesize a rare mineral that could protect the ship from the anomalies of the Expanse. While there, they rescue a woman from being sold into slavery. It appears she may have some information about the Xindi... but it fact, she is an undercover operative, working for the Xindi to gather intel on the humans.

The "bookends" of this episode expose for me why I think it's mostly filler. We check in again on the "evil Xindi war council," bickering some more about their Earth-destroying weapon. It's not that the planet killer won't work; it's just that (only four episodes into the season) it's taking too long. So we're told right out of the gate that everything that's going to happen in this episode is in service of a "plan B," something by definition that's new, unrelated to the ongoing story, and isn't likely to be a thing going forward. So twice now, these villainous scenes with the Xindi have not only failed to deliver anything more than generic mustache twirling, they've actively undermined the build of interest in the plot to come.

That plot looks like it's going to be classic Star Trek (I'm talking original series), with the captain finding an alien woman who seems attracted to him. It's a nice subversion to make Rajiin a super-spy who takes full-body medical scans with her hands and is out to manipulate them all. But then the subversion quickly falls into predictable Enterprise patterns: she's gotta have an overtly sexual encounter with everyone she meets -- Hoshi, a security guard, and of course T'Pol -- which feels extra icky, in that it plays out like yet another sexually-coded assault on her. (Don't "worry," there's reciprocal ick when she's captured, thrown in the brig, and Archer manhandles Rajiin for information.)

None of this plan makes much sense, when you scratch beneath the surface. Did embedding Rajiin aboard Enterprise all hinge on them happening to come to that particular alien bazaar, and happening to have a run-in with that slave trader? The whole goal here -- getting body scans of humans -- highlights the fact that at the end of the day, the Xindi don't really know much about humans. Did they know that human morality would include feeling sympathy for enslaved people? How did they know about the "honeypot" cliche? You don't have to try reasoning through any of this for long, though; the episode culminates in a big firefight in which Reptilian Xindi board the ship and blast everything in sight (with an admittedly cool-looking weapon) to retrieve their operative. 

Aside from that big concluding action scene, though, Enterprise is not up to its usual standards when it comes to production. The alien bazaar is a disappointment, cobbled together with stuff from the prop closet, and not even supported by music of any kind (neither diegetic nor conventional score; it's weirdly quiet). Slow motion (a rarity in Star Trek) is used not once, but twice -- and is incredibly awkward both times.

Other observations:

• The massage scenes continue, as Enterprise writers continue to play out the idea that every backrub eventually leads to sex. (They "hang a lantern on it" this time, by having Trip and T'Pol talk about how people are gossiping... but that's still exactly where this story is going.)

• It's a fun moment when the crew trades a suitcase of spices to an alien in exchange for information. That alien is a particularly gross creation (in a fun way), as all he wants to do with the spices is sniff them and sneeze.

The extended action sequence at the end of this episode -- the big shoot-out aboard Enterprise -- is well-executed. Pretty much everything else about this episode is dull time-filler, a way to feature the Xindi story without actually progressing the Xindi story. I give "Rajiin" a C+.

Something Fishy

Now that I've blogged about the bird-watching game Wingspan and its dragon-themed spin-off Wyrmspan, I'm caught up to talk about its latest spinoff, the fish-themed Finspan.

Like its predecessors, Finspan is an engine-building game in which you play cards with hopefully complementary abilities, building up the resources to play even more cards... hoping in the end to score more points than the other players. As you would expect, the gameplay is generally quite similar despite some cosmetic differences.

You once again play your cards in three lines -- though Finspan cosmetically twists this 90 degrees by having you play in columns (representing ocean depth) rather than rows. You once again can use your turn to survey all your cards in one line (this time, "diving" past them) to collect any repeating benefits they award. And you have a limited number of turns to work with in the game -- this time, 24 split evenly across four rounds.

Finspan makes a few adjustments that are not simply cosmetic. While all three games have eggs you spend to play new creatures, these actually hatch into tokens which then can be moved around your ocean. Movement itself is a "resource" of a sort, because if you can join three young together in one spot, they form a school that doubles the number of points they're worth at the end of the game.

Unlike Wingspan and Wyrmspan, Finspan eliminates the concept of "food types" that are used to play new cards. It's a curious choice that on the one hand makes the game simpler by eliminating multiple resources the players must accumulate and plan around. On the other hand, it removes some flavor that might make the game a bit more accessible to inexperienced gamers, removing concrete concepts like berries, grubs, and grains (for birds; meat, milk, and others for dragons) and abstracting them -- to play new fish, you just discard other cards, or eggs, or young.

Finspan also makes the "combo-building" nature of these games more explicit by dividing each of the three columns into three zones: shallow, mid, and deep. When your diver descends in a column, you get a specific bonus in each zone simply for having any fish there (regardless of whether it has a power of its own you can trigger). It gives players something to shoot for independent of what the cards say they do: spread out across the different depths of your ocean to maximize your rewards.

Because of the streamlining of food and highlighting of combo-building, many experienced gamers have rallied around the idea that Finspan is the "simplest" of the Span family of games. I'd say the difference is subtle, if real at all; Mandy Patinkin would probably still have a hard time learning Finspan. And I really don't find the game in any way "less satisfying" to play. (Not that I always prefer more challenging games anyway.)

In fact, I certainly prefer Finspan to Wyrmspan, in part because of how it highlights that theme can really matter in a game. In my review of the dragon version, I commented that collecting fictional dragons wasn't nearly as compelling to me as reading factoids about actual birds (especially because in Wyrmspan, while they wrote a mountain of fictional information about the fictional dragons, they didn't bother to actually print any of it on the cards). Finspan brings us back to the real world, and once again each card features an intriguing little factoid about a fish you may or may not have ever heard of. It cements for me that in the Span games, the real-world themes are a significant part of the appeal to me.

Where I've called Wingpsan maybe an A- or B+, and Wyrmspan maybe a B or B+, I feel that Finspan ought to slot solidly in the middle. Call it a B+, no "maybe" about it. It's quite possible that no gamer's collection needs to include all three. But it's just as possible that a fan of any one of them might want to check out the others.

Enterprise Flashback: Extinction

Season three of Star Trek: Enterprise promised an ongoing, single plotline, built around an allegory of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But episode three of the season, "Extinction," was a big hint about what the season would really look like.

When Enterprise explores an alien planet, several crewmembers are exposed to a virus that mutates them into an alien species. As they pursue an innate primal instinct to find their "home," Enterprise tries to cure them... while trying to keep a third party from killing the team to prevent the spread of the contagion.

Here's the dirty secret of Enterprise season three: it isn't actually all connected. This is the first of many  episodes that center on the crew dealing with a one-off sci-fi problem. Previously, the classic Star Trek model would begin with a captain's log that went something like: "Starfleet sent us to do this thing, and so here we are to do the thing. I sure hope nothing unexpected happens!" It takes only the tiniest rewrite of that monologue to instead say: "Our hunt for the Xindi has led us here, and we're going to investigate. I sure hope nothing unexpected happens!" Here, the Macguffin of the Xindi database from the previous episode serves as the grease to get this week's plot machine in motion. But is that really connected? Certainly not in the way we think of modern serialized television. But not even -- I'd submit -- in the way of more serialized shows of the time (such as 24, the show I'm increasingly convinced Enterprise was trying to emulate).

All that surely sounds like I'm complaining... and I suppose I am -- just not in the way you might think. I'm fine with Star Trek continuing to be a show of one-off adventures. Deep Space Nine ended with a serialized, 10-episode arc, but had earned that by slowly building up recurring characters and story threads over seven seasons. Outside of that, I'm not sure that season-long story arcs is what Star Trek is built to do best (and Discovery might have been the show that later went on to prove that). But bottom line, whether Enterprise has or hasn't begun a single, long narrative isn't itself the issue.

The issue for me is that the writers of Enterprise seem to be thinking that the Xindi arc is a bold new way to reset the series. "Extinction" demonstrates that the show hasn't really changed at all. And that is the problem for me. Enterprise needs to develop its characters into more three-dimensional people. (Making the human characters likeable in any way would be a plus.) Bending a little away from mindless action and more toward provocative ideas wouldn't hurt, either. Nothing baked into the Xindi arc addresses any of that, and so to me, the change isn't likely to actually boost the show.

"Extinction" reinforces these feelings by being another truly mediocre outing, making three in a row to start the new season. The idea of mutating crewmembers is a bit stale to begin with -- it's been done several other times on Star Trek (once featuring this episode's director, LeVar Burton). None of those past episodes was especially good, either. That probably makes the writers think there's room to "get it right this time." I'd say maybe they're not taking the hint.

They try to tweak the idea a little this time around. The "de-evolved" characters have their own alien language. (We quickly learn it, of course). Previously unavailable visual effects are employed to show Archer's internal organs mutating inside his body, and the strange shift in his vision. (But these look pretty hokey.) We learn this mutation was purposefully created to try to perpetuate a dying species. (That nugget is interesting, but doesn't change much about the course of the story.) Ultimately, the episode feels quite familiar.

So it falls on the actors to make any kind of meal of this. Perhaps because Linda Park and Dominic Keating are so rarely given anything to do on this show, they really try to feast and leave no crumbs -- especially, Park, who really leans (sometimes literally) into the animal posture of Hoshi's alien version. Scott Bakula also really "commits to the bit." Collectively, the three keep this from seeming as silly as it could have, but can't hoist the episode on their shoulders alone into something solid.

Other observations:

• I guess there is a bit of season 3 continuity I haven't properly credited: Trip is still getting late night back rubs from T'Pol. (Sigh.)

• Even as an alien, Reed sucks at his job. You'd think he'd be a better fighter than Archer, but in a fight for food, Reed quickly capitulates.

• Aliens arrive to keep this virus from spreading off world. They tell Enterprise: "Your vessel is under quarantine. Prepare to be boarded." I don't think they understand what "quarantine" means.

"Extinction" really poses an almost-impossible acting challenge to three of the series regulars. Even as I can acknowledge the unfairness of that, I can't pretend the episode is "good" just because they give it their best effort. I grade it a C+.

Here We Go: Again

A new Marvel television series (Ironheart) begins this week. So I suppose it's time I blog some thoughts about the last Marvel show, before I fall behind.

Daredevil: Born Again was the fittingly titled revival of Netflix's Daredevil series, and in particular the return of two actors widely appreciated in two comic book roles: Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock and Vincent D'Onofrio as Wilson Fisk. Over a 9-episode season, Born Again tracked the fallout when Fisk was elected mayor of New York, and began cracking down on vilgilante activity... at just the moment when Matt chose voluntarily to hang up his Daredevil suit and pursue justice under the law.

I found Daredevil: Born Again to be a very uneven season of television. A lot of that begins with the high bar set by the original 3 seasons of the Netflix show. That series skillfully blended thoughtful storytelling, great acting, top-notch action, and stylish cinematography in an appealing cocktail only surpassed by Jessica Jones in that stable of Marvel shows.

Born Again does try to put the same principles front and center. The story is very much inspired by the real-world moment we find ourselves in, following what happens when an utterly corrupt criminal is able to seize the levers of political power. The consequences seem only slightly exaggerated for the comic book genre... and arguably seems less so with every passing day as we all live with a real-world political figure behaving in increasingly cartoon-villain-ish ways.

The great acting is still intact -- largely because most of the hard work on casting was done for the original Netflix show. Daredevil: Born Again reportedly underwent a lot of creative turmoil behind the scenes, some of that having to do with actually recasting a few key characters before ultimately throwing out the footage to bring back the original actors. However rocky the road was, it ended in the right place with the return of Cox, D'Onofrio, Ayelet Zurer as Vanessa, Wilson Bethel as Poindexter, Deborah Ann Woll as Karen, Elden Henson as Foggy, and more. Plus, a number of new additions to the cast also fit in exactly as they should.

The action remains top-notch, as is the way its filmed. The very first episode starts out with an elaborate "single take" action sequence designed to one-up the original series' well-known "hallway fight," and that ambition extends throughout the season, to an all-out brawl involving a dozen fighters in a sequence of the season finale.

But the whole is less than the sum of the parts here. One problem is the extent to which Daredevil: Born Again wants to be all about the second act of the classic "hero's journey," namely, the "call to action." The hero in that classic story format often refuses the call to action, and that is the story of season one of Daredevil: Born Again -- Matt Murdock trying to hang up the cowl and do things "the right way." That may be honest and honorable, but it's not what you've come to see when watching a show like this. It's not called "Matt Murdock: Born Again," and there are countless excellent legal dramas I could go watch if that's what I was in the mood for. Simply: there's not nearly enough Daredevil in this Daredevil show. And "Daredevil" isn't the only character that gets sidelined for the sake of this story. Some characters that were central (at least in mind) to why the original Daredevil series worked are massively sidelined here. 

Put even more directly -- this new season starts with a terrible story development, and essentially ends on one too. In the beginning, the show treats characters badly by writing them out of the action. At the conclusion of the 8th episode, the show treats Matt Murdock badly by having him make a truly bizarre choice (that even he can't explain in the last episode), purely just to keep the plot going for longer.

But there are some inspired moments along the way. The specter of a serial killer hangs over part of the season, and adds a creepiness to the tale. A bank heist episode in the middle of the season -- a near total one-off, disconnected from the ongoing plot -- is far and away the most fun episode of the batch. 

I'd give the season overall a B-. In total I was slightly positive on it, though really it just made me miss the original Daredevil series. I would probably have been facing a tough choice whether or not to continue with season two when it arrives... except that they upped the ante by promising the return of Jessica Jones (who, as I noted, led the best of the defunct Netflix Marvel series). So alright... you got me. Just... be better next time?