Enterprise Flashback: Singularity

One of the staple story archetypes of Star Trek is the "everyone on the crew starts acting strangely" story. Enterprise took at run at this with "Singularity."

When Enterprise explores a black hole in a trinary star system, the crew begins exhibiting unusually obsessive behavior. And when everyone but T'Pol is rendered unconscious, it falls on her alone to save the ship from destruction.

Forgive me starting with a diversion, but I want to talk about writer Ronald D. Moore. After starting his career on Star Trek, he went on to create several other television series, including the revival of Battlestar Galactica. During the original run of that series, he hosted a weekly podcast about each new episode, which I always made a point of listening to it after the show. His commentary was always shockingly frank, and I will always remember a bit of behind-the-scenes info he revealed about a particularly disliked episode. ("Black Market," if you're a BSG fan.) He admitted that it was a bad episode with little suspense, and he copped to trying to help it in the edit by stealing a scene from the climax to place in the opening teaser, followed by a "48 hours earlier" on-screen cut. It was a cheap trick, he admitted, but they had to do something to improve the slow pace of the first half of the episode.

Since then, I've been especially aware of television episodes that use that trick. Perhaps they're written that way, or perhaps they're edited that way after the fact (like "Black Market"). But I always find myself asking: is the opening section of this story legitimately interesting? Or have they tried to trick me into overlooking a few dull acts?

That question nagged at me as this episode of Enterprise opened with T'Pol alone on Enterprise, recording a desperate log entry... before then flashing back for a truly slow Act One. Hoshi Sato is taking over in the kitchen for the oft-talked-about-but-never-seen Chef. Archer is writing a foreword for a biography about his father. Travis Mayweather has a headache. Trip is tasked with fixing the captain's chair. Reed is going to do his job for once, looking into improved protocols for ship emergencies. None of this seems particularly engaging.

By Act Two, it's becoming clear that everyone is obsessed with these trivial activities. And they kind of have to be trivial activities for the audience to begin to suspect anything is wrong; the characters have so often been depicted as being bad at their jobs that the behavior has to be extreme for anything to seem amiss! 

I find the origin and spread of this contagion to be quite murky. When Chef fell ill, was he patient zero for it all, or was that an unrelated plot contrivance to give Hoshi something to do? Is T'Pol actually immune to the obsession contagion? She says she is -- but frankly, I don't believe her. She seems more irritable than usual with her human shipmates, and withdraws to her quarters to analyze stellar scans, an apparent manifestation of her own obsession. And her own logic seems quite compromised, when she chooses to awaken Archer to help her escape the black hole -- rather than Travis, or any other ship's pilot.

Whatever all these shortcomings total up to, though, I have to admit that the episode is pretty fun. It's the rare episode where everyone in the cast gets something to do, and that "something" involves them all getting to behave out of the ordinary. Reed's story line may exist only to justify an admittedly funny joke about inventing a "Reed Alert," but blessedly, at long last, we get to see him succeed at something. Archer's obsession is bad for poor Porthos, who skips a meal and sulks cutely for the camera. And you can always count on John Billingsley to deliver; Phlox's mad scientist obsession with curing Mayweather's headache makes an effective turn from goofy to harrowing.

There may be a few muddy plot points, but the dialogue is notably sharp. Trip gets most of the best lines, from his characterization of Reed's alert noises as "a bag full of cats" to his wicked retort when Archer accuses him of not knowing anything about writing. ("I'm not the only one!")

Other observations:

• When Archer mentions that you have to perch on the edge of the captain's chair rather than properly sit in it, I thought to myself: "yeah, I see T'Pol sitting in it that way all the time!" And then I thought: "I'll bet this is the show making a story point out of a real world production complaint." I was expecting that they'd use all this as an excuse to actually remodel the captain's chair. But no, in the end, nothing changes; we're told Trip lowers the chair one centimeter, but obviously that's not a real thing. (The change, not the concept of a centimeter.)

• Back in season one, one of the maybe two things we learned about Malcolm Reed is that he'll eat pretty much anything. So it's inconsistent here to have him be the character complaining to Hoshi Sato that her meal is too salty.

I feel like this episode lacks clarity on several important plot points. But it is fun to see the entire cast cut loose with strange behavior. It reminds me a bit of an early Deep Space Nine episode, "Dramatis Personae" -- though in a rare occurrence (perhaps even a unique one), I actually think the Enterprise episode is a touch better. I give "Singularity" a B-.