3x08 Twilight

[Dimitris]

Episode No: 060
Air Date: 11.05.2003

A spatial distortion leaves Archer unable to form any new long-term memories. Years in the future, he wakes up one morning and is stunned to learn the outcome of the human-Xindi conflict.


Synopsis
After Enterprise is assaulted by severe spatial distortions, Archer loses the ability to form new, long-term memories, causing him to wake up each morning unaware that any time has passed since the day he was afflicted. Despite the crew's best efforts to keep him involved in decisions, it becomes clear over time that they can't continue to function in this manner, leading T'Pol to become his caretaker and Trip to take command of the ship.

[Dimitris]

09.24.2003
Production Report: McNeill in the Zone for "Twilight"

The obvious allusions invited by the title to a certain other classic TV show are not inappropriate as Enterprise delves into what Scott Bakula describes as "possibly our most interesting, complicated, compelling episode to date" under the direction of Robert Duncan McNeill.
In "Twilight," written by co-producer Mike Sussman, Archer is hit with a spatial distortion that leaves interdimensional parasites in his brain which prevent him from forming any new long-term memories. Because these organisms exist outside normal space-time, Dr. Phlox is unable to treat the captain. Archer therefore wakes up each morning unaware that any time has passed since the day he was infected. One morning he finds himself in a strange dwelling on an alien planet, and T'Pol is there to relate to him the devastating history of the last 12 years.

In Bakula's own words, "I can barely explain it myself, but it does involve time travel into the future, parasites in my hippocampus, and Xindi and subspace implosions." He said this during yesterday's chat with STARTREK.COM (related transcript). In his September 10 chat, he also called it "potentially the best script we've had and the best show to date" (related transcript).

He actually did that chat during a break from the first day of filming for "Twilight" (the day of the Season 3 premiere). The script calls for scenes taking place not only in the present day of the series (October 2153), but at various points in the future, up to 12 years hence. The first few scenes were shot in Archer's Quarters, when he wakes up in the "very near future" and "near future." In one sequence he grappled with a Xindi-Reptilian invader played by stuntman Jacob Chambers (Bakula was doubled by stunt coordinator Vince Deadrick Jr.). At the end of the Sept. 10 chat, Bakula revealed, "I have to go now and fight a Xindi-Reptilian. I don't want to give anything away, but he loses."

For Thursday's shoot, the Bridge and Corridor sets were modified to reflect years of wear and damage, and the actors were also aged (there were also extra pips on their uniforms). As implied above, there is a Xindi-Reptilian invasion of the ship at one point, and Chambers was joined by Joey Anaya and Ian Eyre as fellow stunt-Xindi. Keith Campbell, Gil Rosales and Justin Sunquist did stunts as both NX-01 crewmen and MACOs in action scenes with the Xindi. Thursday was September 11, and the entire cast and crew took some time to observe a period of reflection to honor the victims of that day two years ago.

On Friday Gary Graham joined the cast for one day as "Soval." He did one "viewscreen" shot, and then a near-future scene with Jolene Blalock as "T'Pol." The actors found themselves literally time-jumping all day, as scenes were filmed on standing ship sets in several different time periods, which meant their makeup had to change between practically every set-up.

The production was marred by tragedy as the team reported to work Monday morning to learn that First Assistant Director Jerry Fleck had died over the weekend of natural but unknown causes. By 10:00 a.m. it was decided that the company would shut down for the day to mourn the loss of the beloved crew member (related story, updated with photos and new info). Fleck was not actually working on this episode, but was in pre-production on the next one, titled "North Star." This season Fleck has worked as 1st A.D. every other episode, alternating with Arlene Fukai and Michael DeMeritt. DeMeritt was 1st A.D. on "Twilight," but when production resumed on Tuesday, he moved over to pre-production duties on "North Star," and Fukai stepped in to complete "Twilight."

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent doing mostly future scenes on ship sets including Sickbay, Engineering, and Corridors. On Thursday, an "Old Porthos" joined Bakula and Blalock for an entire day in the abode Archer wakes up in 12 years in the future. Friday the entire cast reconvened for ship scenes involving some severe damage and injury, mainly on the Bridge and in Engineering. As many as 15 extras filled out the NX-01 crew throughout the schedule, along with a few background Xindi in addition to the stunt players.

This shoot had more than its share of somber moments, so to help lighten things up on the final day, Friday, McNeill came to work wearing his old Voyager uniform (i.e., the one he wore as "Tom Paris"). According to Bakula, McNeill bragged all day about the fact that he still fit in it.

Besides Graham, the guest cast includes Brett Rickaby as "Yedrin Koss," an alien who complicates matters for Enterprise in one of the future scenarios. Rickaby recently appeared in HBO's Carnivale, which is executive produced by former Trek writer/producer Ronald D. Moore and features "Silik" actor John Fleck (no relation to Jerry Fleck, by the way). Rickaby also portrayed Frank Gorshin (an Original Series guest actor) in the TV movie "Return to the Batcave: The Misadventures of Adam and Burt." Richard Anthony Crenna, son of the late Richard Crenna, plays an NX-01 Security Guard.

This is McNeill's third Enterprise episode in as many seasons. He previously directed "Cold Front" and "The Breach." Writer Sussman has many Enterprise scripts to his credit, the most recent being last week's "Anomaly."

"Twilight" is tentatively set to air November 5. UPN has scheduled October 29 for a repeat episode (to be determined). As always, this information is subject to change. More about "Twilight" can be found at its preliminary Episode Detail page.


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[Dimitris]

Plot Summary:

Archer wakes during an attack and goes to the bridge, where he witnesses Earth's destruction by the Xindi. When he wakes again, he is several years older and confused about where he is. T'Pol, who is preparing his breakfast, explains that he was injured by an anomaly while trying to rescue her from its effects. His brain was infected by parasites that are preventing him from forming new long-term memories; he can never remember more than a few hours beyond the moment when he was infected. Admiral Forrest gave T'Pol a field commission and she took command when it became obvious that the captain could not be kept up to speed on the mission.

T'Pol and the crew tried to find the Xindi weapon, but Enterprise was damaged after Mayweather's death when T'Pol used a desperate battle tactic and the ship could not even reach warp two. The weapon had already been deployed by the time Enterprise tracked it. After Earth's destruction, the Xindi continued to pursue humans in colonies and on other worlds, until all those remaining set up a secret colony on the fifth planet of the Ceti Alpha system. T'Pol resigned to take care of Archer there, and Tucker became Enterprise's Captain.

Twelve years have passed since Archer lost his memory, and T'Pol tells him that it is an important day: Phlox has come from Denobula with a plan to eradicate the parasites, which exist outside of normal space-time and therefore cannot be damaged by any conventional means. The three of them travel to Enterprise, which is uncomfortable for Archer because from his perspective, he saw the crew just hours before, when in reality they have all aged and some have died. Initial tests of Phlox's treatment, which uses energy from the warp engines, show that the parasites have been destroyed not only in the present but in the past, for they have disappeared from brain scans taken of Archer years before. But before Phlox can complete the treatment, Tucker discovers that the Xindi have used a spy to follow the doctor from Denobula and lead them to the hidden human colony. He orders the treatment stopped to preserve energy for the coming battle.

Enterprise is badly damaged despite bolstering to the shields provided by General Shran. The bridge is destroyed. Archer realizes that finishing his treatment may be the only way to stop the Xindi, for if the parasites were destroyed at previous points in the time continuum, he might have remained in command of Enterprise and history might have unfolded differently. Unfortunately, given the damage to the ship, the only way to destroy the parasites for certain is to create a subspace implosion, which will also kill Archer and destroy the ship. However, since Xindi-Reptilians have boarded and crewmembers are dying every minute, they have little to lose. Phlox and T'Pol both fall to Xindi weapons fire but Archer, despite being shot twice, manages to complete the procedure to overload the engines before he collapses.

The captain wakes in sickbay. T'Pol and Phlox tell him that they have cleared the anomalies, that he has a concussion and that the ship sustained only minor damage. At Archer's request, T'Pol brings him a pillow and he tells her that she would make a wonderful nurse.

[Dimitris]

Analysis:

"Twilight" contributes almost nothing original to the Trek oeuvre. It's Voyager's "Future's End" and "Shattered" crossed with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek: First Contact, with a storytelling twist like the one in the film Memento (which might seem like a contribution to the Trek oeuvre if something similar hadn't happened to the Enterprise-D crew in "Cause and Effect"). Whether one finds this a brilliant episode or an utterly derivative one will depend on one's level of emotional investment in the storyline and the characters. Personally, I could argue it either way. Or, to put it more frankly, I really enjoyed it, but for terrible reasons that make me feel ashamed and guilty. So I'll argue both.

The critic in me, the longtime Trek fan in me, the feminist in me were all screaming at T'Pol quitting her job, abandoning her people and burying her head in the sand so she could play nursemaid/would-be-girlfriend to Archer. As it turns out, this decision saved everyone, because she was around to understand that the thingamabots in his brain were the key to reversing history, but she couldn't have known that; at the time she made the decision, all she knew was that she felt guilty/obligated/attached, and decided that sitting out the waning days of the human race at his side was more important than staying on Enterprise and trying to help save the rest of humanity. Can anyone imagine Spock spending most of his life making breakfast for a brain-damaged Kirk?

...okay, bad example. I've read fan fiction where that happened. Err, I've read fan fiction where Chakotay did the same for Janeway too. It's called the hurt/comfort scenario, and it usually ends up with fantastic sex between the injured party and the caretaker following some sort of miracle cure. Perhaps this is why the critic in me, the longtime Trek fan in me, the feminist in me all shut up and got all sniffly when Phlox asked T'Pol whether Archer knew how she felt about him and she did such a rotten job pretending not to understand.

Mind you, this doesn't make it a good story. This is one of the least original plot developments in the history of plot developments, and of course it had to be reset-buttoned out of existence at the end. Not because Earth blew up, but because we all know from previous Treks that when the captain and a crewmember get together, like Picard and Crusher in "All Good Things" or Sisko and Kira in "Through the Looking Glass", we're either in an alternate timeline or an alternate universe.

And how much would some of us have paid to see that cliche with Janeway and Chakotay, just long enough for one kiss?

Ahem. "Twilight." (I'm now singing the E.L.O song by the same name. "Twilight/I gave you time to steal my mind/Away from me.") The heck with it: I loved this episode. Yeah, I should complain at greater length about T'Pol playing nurse and Sato being the only surviving regular who's basically doing the same job twelve years down the road while the boys have been promoted to captain, but I'm not in the mood. And let's not get started on the fact that Archer withstands three shots by a Xindi weapon that fells T'Pol in one. We get to see our lovely Vulcan in a uniform instead of a catsuit, after all.

We're encouraged to think nostalgically by the fact that Enterprise leads its ragtag, fugitive fleet on a lonely quest: a shining planet known as Ceti Alpha Five, best known as the charming place where Kirk stranded Khan without bothering to figure out that neighboring Ceti Alpha Six was going to explode and level the planet six months later. The time-warping mechanism of the thingamabots made little sense to me (if the ones destroyed by the initial treatment had ceased to exist on the brain scans, how come T'Pol and Phlox remembered that they had ever been there in the first place?) but I had similar problems in Voyager's "Timeless" when Kim and Chakotay used Borg tachyons in Seven's cranial implant to send a message to her in the past, so this isn't a new issue. In fact the very nonsense of it fits right in with previous Trek reset-button episodes, where sometimes characters remember alternate histories ("Parallels") and sometimes they don't ("The Year of Hell").

The emotional core of this episode rests with the characters most changed by the alterations, in this case Archer and T'Pol. And though Connor Trinneer does a wonderful job as Trip in command, though John Billingsley has some lovely moments playing the doctor who never quite ceases to be an outsider among humans, though Scott Bakula has wrenching moments first shaking his head in mute denial as he watches Earth's destruction, then thanking T'Pol for giving up so much of her life for him, this is Jolene Blalock's episode. She's astonishingly good. I'm finally buying T'Pol as a Vulcan, even though I still think she's too emotional in her decisionmaking, because Blalock has become so skillfull at portraying subtlety of expression. She's a wonderful mixture of hope and despair in the future, and a wonderful mixture of determination and disappointment in the past.

So I loved T'Pol's barely-repressed rage reminding Soval that if Vulcans had not held back human technological development, then Earth might have been able to defend itself, and I loved both her anger at Trip when he berated the decision that probably saved the ship but cost it high warp speeds and her resignation when she told him she would turn over command to him to stay with Archer. I loved her ability to predict what Archer would need to hear, the bleakness and humor rolled together in her recitation of his sad romantic past, and I loved her very subtle overreaction to Phlox's query about her level of attachment. And, okay, again, I loved her in uniform. She's a much stronger presence in uniform even when she's doing something as stereotypically feminine as sacrificing her career for love. Please, can she become an official Starfleet officer soon?

This has been an even more subjective review than usual, but I maintain that the pleasures of this episode are more subjective than most. Either you're sick of reset button episodes or you don't mind them in the service of storytelling; either you're willing to rush ahead through the Xindi arc to this conclusion or you're annoyed that it hasn't been developed better in the present tense; either you buy that deep down T'Pol loves Archer and would go to these lengths for him or you don't. And either you think these are what Enterprise should be about, or you want it to tell more original science fiction stories and give Sato and Mayweather more to do. In my case, all of the above, but when forced to choose, the relationship fan in me comes roaring to the fore. Still. And if you're disgusted, that's fine, because I am too...but apparently not enough to stop it.


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