Enterprise Flashback: Harbinger

Season three of Star Trek: Enterprise set up the mysterious "spheres" of the Expanse quite early on. But the mystery of who built them was not illuminated until more than halfway through the season, with "Harbinger."

Enterprise rescues an alien shuttle from inside a spatial anomaly... and begins to suspect secret motives from its lone occupant. Reed and Hayes butt heads over the crew's combat readiness and their own positions on the ship. And Trip's flirtation with an attractive MACO spurs an unexpected reaction from T'Pol.

I have often criticized episodes of Enterprise for being too plot-driven and not including enough scenes to develop character. This episode seemingly wants to address that all at once with this episode that's nearly all drama between characters and very little conventional plot. But the story lines fall short for me at almost every turn because this is simply not how this series has been built to operate.

To be fair, the writers have spent all season gradually pushing Trip and T'Pol together as a couple. They've been stripping down to rub each other almost every episode, so I wouldn't exactly say they've shown "restraint" -- but they writers have taken their time to play out a passable "will they, won't they?" story line. Yet if the final move in that game was to be a love triangle, they really should have established the third point, Amanda Cole, at some point before this. We've had multiple MACO characters appear multiple times in the season; she should have been one of them.

But we do get a different returning MACO, Major Hayes. I guess one or two episodes of Reed doing something to make himself look vaguely competent were too much for the writers, because here they're back to making him the worst main cast character on any Star Trek. He is, in reality show terms, a "messy bitch." He just picks one fight after another with Hayes throughout this episode, and the only time he gets anywhere remotely in the area of "being right" is when he sticks up for Travis getting roughed up in combat training more than necessary. Is all this plausible, realistic "workplace conflict?" Kinda. Still, it's not an endearing thing to do a character that should be generally heroic. Reed's climactic brawl with Hayes is a good opportunity for the show's stunt team -- but story-wise, the only one who looks good here is Archer, who orders them to settle their beef.

Perhaps the reason we get these big "B" and "C" plots is because the episode doesn't actually want to devote that much time to the "A" plot. The writers need to put the idea of the "Sphere Builder" aliens into play for the rest of the season-long story, but don't actually want to reveal much yet since there are still many episodes to go. Star Trek veteran Thomas Kopache is cast to play the alien, and does a good job with the mostly mustache-twirling role. But I think the makeup design is a bad choice -- the unhealthy alien looks enough like a Suliban that you get pretty far into the episode before learning that he actually isn't one.

Other observations:

• This being Enterprise, they have to be as titillating as possible: including a shot of naked T'Pol that shows just a bit of butt. Although... that's not how it originally aired on UPN in 2004. This episode was first broadcast less than 2 weeks after the infamous Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction," and that scene was hastily altered to zoom in enough to crop the image at the base of her back. 

• As bad as Reed acts in this episode, Hayes doesn't come off better. When the two of them are trying to stop the Sphere Builder late in the episode, their shared first instinct is to shoot phasers in the direction of the ship's warp reactor. 

This episode ends with the feeling of a cliffhanger, yet its messy character arcs don't quite feel like the stuff cliffhangers are made of. Bringing the Sphere Builders into the story is interesting, but I'm generally left feeling like not much happens here. I give "Harbinger" a C+.