Twelve years have passed since Enterprise entered the Delphic Expanse. An unfortunate accident has stripped Archer of the ability to form long term memories, and without his leadership of Enterprise, the Xindi succeeded in destroying Earth. The handful of human survivors live on a remote colony, where T'Pol personally cares for her former captain. But now, Phlox may have discovered a way to cure Archer's condition. And because of the strange temporal component to his affliction, the cure may be the key to winding back the clock.
I will come right out and say that I do think "Twilight" is a pretty good episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. But I truly hope it's not literally the best one in my eyes once I've finished this re-watch, because there's a ceiling on how much I truly enjoyed it. Mostly, that's because I find it to be a Frankenstein's monster of sewn-together bits lifted from other previous Star Trek episodes. It's a bit "All Good Things...", a bit "The Visitor," a bit "Year of Hell," a bit "Timeless," and possibly a few other episodes too. Since some of those episodes are regarded among the absolute best of their respective Star Trek series, a tinkered version of them will inevitably come out worse in comparison.
On the other hand, there's something about "Twilight" that defies an across-the-board one-to-one comparison to any of those episodes. It's taking single ingredients from all of them, and incorporating them in a new recipe that does somehow feel new, if familiar. Plus, there are a few new ingredients that make all the difference. Some are just fun Trek fan service, from seeing first T'Pol and then Trip become ship's captain, to seeing aged-up characters with new hairstyles and the haunted looks of what they've endured over a decade. Especially fun is the twisted irony that the last survivors of Earth set up on Ceti Alpha V -- a planet that we know from Wrath of Khan will become a barren wasteland in a century or so.
But there are more emotional elements that I find more worthwhile than all that. In the midst of this arc about saving the Earth from destruction, it's clever for this episode to find a way to show us just what that would look like. It's smart to position T'Pol as the caretaker for Archer when he develops a kind of dementia, an intriguing way to showcase the subsumed emotion beneath her logical exterior. We feel for her, imagining the way she had to repeat the same story to Archer, day after day, for over a decade. We feel for him, watching him struggle to still contribute to the mission, but being frustrated at every turn by his condition.
It's too bad, though, that it all has to end with yet another "total reset" like Voyager's "Year of Hell" two-parter. For me, it renders the story just a notch above "it was all a dream," stripping it of its full impact as it literally removes any lasting consequences. To me, it undermines the complete enjoyment of the admittedly cool moments we got along the way: T'Pol's desperate battle tactic to ram a docked ship into the enemy, the wild frenzy of Archer stabbing an invader with his Zefram Cochrane statue, or seeing the bridge torn open to space in an inspired VFX shot.
Other observations:
- This episode serves up an almost-Quantum Leap-style shot, where Scott Bakula looks into a mirror and his character is surprised by his own reflection.
- The writers continue their poor treatment of Travis Mayweather, this time killing his character off in an early attack so that he doesn't even live to the future with the rest of the main characters.
- There's a weird subplot about the Xindi paying a Yridian to track Phlox. The implication seems to be that they somehow know that Phlox is on the cusp of figuring out how to cure Archer and reset history. But... how do they know that? Phlox himself doesn't even know that curing Archer will defeat the Xindi, until he begins to actually do it. (But if they don't know it, why are they after Phlox at all?)
- Lots of great stunt work in this episode in the two separate sequences where Enterprise is boarded.
- Reportedly, the idea for this episode was originally pitched on Star Trek: Voyager, and centered on Janeway and Chakotay. It was apparently rejected because the Powers That Be refused to pair the two romantically in that way, even in an alternate future that would be undone.
I feel like "Twilight" centers on character in a way few Enterprise episodes to this point have. It's a shame that any emotional development is rolled back by the ending. But for spectacle alone, I'll put it a notch ahead of "Year of Hell"... which puts it at a B+ in my book.
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