Don’t they have to go to war with the Klingons to keep to canon?
Space Seed just called; it wants its story back.
I thought it was more like; “Don’t worry. Hannibal Lecter raised you, but these are your birth parents.”
I gotta ask. Are you or your child adopted?
Homage.
Remember that word.
Manny wanted this story to be linked to Khan. It’s simply too good a concept to not do. And it also works as a tie in to the heritage of Data.
Basically, they were having loads of Trekky fun.
Still, ymmv.
With Borderland, I thought it verged on pandering. With this episode, I’ve changed my mind. I thing it’s good story telling within the Trek universe.
So how does Khan fit in?
Was Khan engineered by Arik Soong?
Where is Khan at the time of this episode - has he been born yet?
Khan and his people were put into suspended animation in the late 1990’s (IIRC) aboard the SS Botany Bay. It would be long gone by the time Enterprise is set.
Khan’s long gone.
Khan was active in the 90s, during the Eugenics wars - 150+ years before the NX-01 is launched.
My brother is.
And a woman I was dating two-and-a-half years ago (another Doper, as a matter of fact) was raised by her biological mother and the man her mother married when said woman-I-was-dating was around 2 years old. This stepfather was the man she called “daddy,” not her biological father.
I was saying, "The rest of the cast is looking especially lame in the presence of a decent actor when I caught myself and realized I was saying that about Brent Spiner. :eek: Though he did improve throughout the run of ST:TNG. He seemed to be Stewart’s protege as much as Data was Picards.
Thanks for the update, too.
Apparently the Augments DNA includes a permanent retro-hairdo and a set of holey clothes.
I thought the episode just didn’t advance things much. There was no character development, no new philosophical jabs for or against genetic engineering. The only interesting point, glossed over, is that T’Pol and Trip actually tried to blow up all those scientists, Augments, Soong, and Archer. An actual moral dilemna that wasn’t explored. Of course, you don’t have to explore a dilemna that doesn’t come to fruition.
At first I thought Soong was cold-hearted and would kill if it helped his cause. Then it seemed the writers wimped out to make him sympathetic, like the proverbial repentant bad guy. But now I see it differently. On the surface, Soong talks like a man that wants his new race to replace the humans, but it really seems that he wants people to see that he’s invented a better mouse and join the parade - get some augmentation themselves and join the new party.
The concept of child growth was completely overlooked. While they are augments, certain features of human development are usually hard to gloss over. Children raised together from birth through age six usually do not develop sexual attraction for each other - but this is a really minor point since they are Augments, Persis is power hungry and Malik’s got the power, and this is a story. Second, having lost Soong when they were still young, their patterns of speech, development of emotions, and social interactions should be skewed from the social norm.
Unlike most of the episode, a nice point was when Malik was confessing killing his brother to Soong. He saw that a logical argument wasn’t pleasing his father so he shifted to a childish fear/he-made-me-do-it. And this was also calculated as seen in that final hug. That was a good scene showing a range of childishness/cunning/cold-bloodiness in the Augments.
I liked the shuttle entering the Bird of Prey and shooting off to warp. I hope their inertial dampeners were working.
[ul][li]Silly how they subtitled “eleven years earlier” but didn’t subtitle “the present” when they moved forward in time. If caught unawares you wouldn’t mentally switch gears.[]Investigating Trialis there was dust in the air, but none on the euqipment. And no alien cobwebs.[]Why didn’t they bio-scan Trialis before going in and thereby locate Udar/Smike?[]Whew, I’m glad after trip said that Soong took “incubators” that he explained that those were “artifical wombs”. I also missed that scientific epiphany.[]Are we sure that Hoshi’s and Mayweather’s parts weren’t spliced from previous episodes?[]So, Security is so lousy on the Top-Secret Station that they have to ask “Who are you” before sounding an alarm?[]What is this encrypted-at-the-quantum-level technobabble? Just keep things more real. The guy’s gotta type in a code. Just make it long. (Did you see how few keystrokes he took to unlock the door?) If you wanted to hint at frightening mental abilities, have the Augment say that he was running a few hundred thousand codes through the security algorithm and would break the code after seeing how fast the computer rejected each incorrect code![]At one point, when Archer sat in his command chair, you could see his chair arm display pads. They had lights running up and down them and they were blinking in an up and down strobe-like way. That would drive me completely NUTS! (Ah-haaa!)[]“Screw the tech, kill him; but don’t kill my special friend Phlox.”[]Apparently that tube in which the scientist died automatically cleans itself of every-last-molecule of pathogens, otherwise when they opened it for Phlox, he, or the whole station would be infected.[]Good touch with Malik taking some pathogens.What are the odds Archer doesn’t make it in time and the Station is flooded with pathogens?[/ul][/li]So the Augments will release some pathogens onto a Klingon planet and start the Human-Klingon war. I guess the Romulans will have to wait in line.
Archer needs to work on his hand-to-hand tactics. He would have known that he couldn’t take Malik in a fair fight, why the hell didn’t he just kick that Augment in the balls?
I really shouldn’t be posting to this thread, as I do not watch Enterprise. Not really by choice (I share my TV with Enterprise-haters), but still, I don’t watch it.
But to comment on this post, I believe that WWIII happened before the events of First Contact. Zephram Cochran developed warp drive in the aftermath of the war. Thus, it was too early for it to matter much to the Trekkers.
True, the Eugenics War was also early, but it spawned a great character–Khan. I don’t think that Colonel Green (from TOS: The Savage Curtain–I think he’s the only WWIII character we hear about) ever really mattered to anyone.
Okay, this is three weeks in a row where I’ve liked the episode more than I’ve disliked it. There are a few nitpicks worth making, and I won’t repeat them from above (mostly they’re about logistics and tactics that seem more 20th-century than futuristic, e.g. the security guard thing noted by Mr. Case), but for the most part the episode just galloped right along and didn’t give us to think about stuff in detail.
(One minor thing I’d like to have seen: Remember that one Kirk-era show where Kirk was on an away mission, had gotten himself in trouble, and was forced to call his ship to tell his crew that everything was okay? And he said something like, “Everything’s under control, condition green,” which made his captors happy? And then on the ship we saw Scott going to high alert, because “condition green” was code for “HELP ME YOU BASTARDS”? It would have been nice to reference that a little bit here, instead of having Archer leap forward and shout anxiously, “Carry out your orders!” and thus put the augments on alert. If instead he’d said something like, “Don’t worry, T’Pol. Stow shields and back off,” the augments would all relax and be caught off guard by the attempt to hijack their computers and destroy the station. Just a nice procedural detail I would have liked to see get carried forward, as long as they’re so clearly looking back at their ancestry.)
In general, I am pleasantly surprised, no, perhaps astonished, at the difference in the show’s energy and tone now that Coto is calling more of the shots. The action matters; the characters interact; the stories move. Sure, the supporting cast is still being shortchanged, but that might be considered a nod back at Classic Trek. Instead of the ensemble feel of TNG and later incarnations, the Archer-Trip-T’Boobs triangle that dominates every episode to the exclusion of the other characters could be looked at as putting sort of a spin on the Kirk-Spock-McCoy troika. And sure, there are odd little moments when the lethargic energy resurfaces, when characters seem to be strolling or jawing a lot when there’s stuff at stake that needs to be resolved now. (Example in this episode: the “button shot” at the end, the cliffhanger with Archer descending the ladder, was static and uninteresting and did not convey the sense of urgency that’s supposed to hook us into next week’s followup.)
I’m glad I changed my mind and kept watching. It’s starting to feel like Trek again.
Holey clothes, Batman!
[QUOTE=Corner Case]
[li]Apparently that tube in which the scientist died automatically cleans itself of every-last-molecule of pathogens, otherwise when they opened it for Phlox, he, or the whole station would be infected.[/li][/QUOTE]
I can at least answer this one. There was more than one tube. There was at least one shot of the dead guy still in his tube after Phlox had been sealed into his.
Given Phlox’s wife’s attraction for Trip and the acceptance by Phlox, it may be that another of Phlox’s wives found Jeremy attractive. So Jeremy has a familial attraction to Phlox.
Thanks Smeghead for the reminder about the tubes.
Hey, Soong left them when they were 10 – and no one’s run to Target to get them new back-to-school (or back-to-taking-over-the-universe) clothes yet, so their clothes are gradually wearing and tearing as they grow.
Although, for some reason, it seems worse on the males than on the females.
The Augments had access to the vast computer archives available to Starfleet and obviously brought along by Soong. I guess, without prompting, no one thought to look up, “Needle and thread, Sewing by” in the encyclopedia galactica. Or that classic tome, “Replicators and You.”
Even Persis’s tightie-bluesies had holes in them.
corner case raised a question that I have been pondering as well: Don’t the folks on ENT have a good tricorder or sensor scan? Time for an upgrade? They should have been able to detect Smike.