As the Augments escalate their attacks, Arik Soong realizes the extent of Malik's depravity and commits to working against him. Can Soong get back to Enterprise and convince Archer of his intentions? And can they actually stop these genetically enhanced foes before they strike a Klingon world and provoke an all-out war?
I talked a little in my last review about how this Augment story line was a classic three-act story arc for Arik Soong. There's not much left to say there. There's not much to say generally, in fact. This last hour basically puts the pedal to the floor on big action with big stakes. It does briefly poke at one moral quandary -- whether it's right for Soong to further alter the DNA of the Augment embryos to reduce their aggression, changing their nature. It's interesting to put a kind of "born this way" argument in the mouth of Malik, who is 100% villain at this point. But the audience isn't made to think about it too deeply. With the commercials taken out, we're in the final act of a two-hour action movie here.
But there are still a few quiet moments. Soong tries one last time to appeal to Malik, who has become utterly disillusioned with his "father." Trip and T'Pol talk about her recent marriage, and the star-crossed nature of a human/Vulcan relationship. Mostly though, we get a wide variety of action.
It starts immediately with the daring rescue of Archer from space. (The CG isn't great, but the idea of this action set piece certainly is.) Along the way, Malik puts Archer in a classic hero's dilemma -- to catch the baddie or save the innocent -- when he dumps a Denobulan ship into a gas giant. There's cloak and dagger, as Persis smuggles Soong off the Augment ship, and Enterprise bluffs a Klingon ship into allowing them passage through Klingon space. Malik and Persis get into a climactic knife fight (in perhaps the fourth or fifth moment you're made to think, "oh, now Malik has gone full pyscho"). Enterprise gets into a scrape with a Klingon ship and uses its grappler of all things to escape.
The episode pays plenty of fun homage to franchise history. The talk of whether Khan's lost ship is fact or myth is a fun argument, as are explicit "rhymes" in the story, like a burned Malik crawling around the wreckage of his defeated ship to set a self-destruct. But the episode also name-checks Insurrection's Briar Patch, and concludes with a playful nod to Soong's new interest in cybernetics, which he imagines will yield results "in a generation or two."
Other observations:
- There's fun makeup on Archer after he's beamed out of the vacuum of space.
- The sequencing of action seems off to me in the middle of this episode. When Enterprise disguises itself as a Klingon ship, then encounters the Augments first, I found myself asking "what was the point of that? The Augments are going to treat any other ship as hostile." It's only later, when Enterprise encounters an actual Klingon ship in its territory, that the point of the ruse is made crystal clear.
- Enterprise's determination not to use its characters at all is so frustrating sometimes. Even Uhura got to say "hailing frequencies open" on the regular. At one moment in this episode, when Mayweather is issued an order, he doesn't even get a line of dialogue to acknowledge it.
- By this point, even Reed is aware of his own shooting accuracy. When Enterprise has to shoot down the Augments' weapon before it hits the Klingon planet, Reed fires three torpedoes. (And only hits on the third shot.)
- Malik is so tough, you have to shoot a "Death Becomes Her" style hole in him to finally take him out.
- Even though Enterprise saves the Klingon colony, Klingons are always itching for a fight. Why wouldn't they still use this incident as provocation for war?
There's something about the conclusion here that feels awfully tidy. Maybe it's just that an entire 20+ episode season of Xindi stuff has conditioned me not to expect wrap ups to come so quickly. Still, even if it's tidy, the episode is fun. I give "The Augments" a B.
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