Enterprise 0110 – Fortunate Son

Originally posted to ScoopMe! on November 21, 2001

LEAD-IN

Fortunate Son : We Take Care of Our Own

Two groups clash and it’s hard to know which to root for.

SYNOPSIS

The Captain and First Officer of the Fortunate, an Earth cargo freighter, play catch with a football across a long, low gravity bay when the ship is attacked.

Porthos and Archer are awakened by a call from Starfleet command. It seems that the Fortunate wasn’t, and now can’t be reached. Starfleet wants the Enterprise to check out the situation. During the briefing about the ship, Mayweather tells how the long boring cargo runs are magnets for diversion (e.g. babies).

Archer and a small away team board the Fortunate and are greeted by Ryan, the first officer, who has assumed command of the ship now that the Captain is injured. Archer offers help to repair the ship, and Phlox offers to help repair the captain. It’s plain that Ryan just wants them to leave. Turns out that unbeknownst to Archer, Ryan captured one of the aliens that attacked the freighter (a Nausicaan) and has been interrogating him for some codes.

As repairs are underway, Mayweather takes Ryan on a tour of the Enterprise. The two drool over the transporter. Eventually, they end up in the mess and have a big dinner. Ryan gets huffy that Mayweather abandoned his own freighter-bound family and joined Starfleet.

Back on the Fortunate, T’Pol helps keep a girl from being discovered during a game of hide-and-seek. Turns out, that T’Pol is also good at the game, as she discovers that there’s a Nausicaan on board the freighter. She and Archer confront Ryan about it. He agrees to let them see the alien, but it’s a trap. A firefight ensues between the Enterprise crew and the Fortunate crew. Ryan seals Archer, T’Pol, Phlox, and Reed in a cargo pod after first burning a hole in the hull. The cargo pod is then set adrift. The Fortunate takes some shots at Enterprise before warping away. Archer wants the Enterprise to follow, but being that all of the cargo pod’s air is venting to space, he takes T’Pol’s suggestion that they first be rescued.

Ryan continues his interrogation of his Nausicaan prisoner, and eventually gets the information that he’s been after — the shield frequencies of Nausicaan ships.

En route to find the Fortunate, Mayweather talks to Archer. Archer gives Mayweather advice that no matter where humans are born, they are still human and have to do the moral thing.

The Fortunate finds the Nausicaan ship that attacked it earlier, and tries to attack it as well. Instead, they are led into a trap where they pass by a Nausicaan base and other Nausicaan ships join in the battle. They want their crewman returned, but Ryan would rather fight. The Nausicaans board the ship.

As the situation deteriorates into a firefight between Ryan and his crew and the Nausicaans, Archer tries negotiation with a Nausicaan captain — who agrees to let the ships go on their way if their crewman is return very soon. Archer then tries to persuade Ryan, and has no luck. Mayweather steps up and finally convinces Ryan to give up his prisoner. The Nausicaans leave.

Archer and Captain Keene, now recovered from his injuries, discuss Ryan’s punishment, and the future.

ANALYSIS

Fortunate Son : We Take Care of Our Own

This being my first review of Enterprise for ScoopMe!, I was hoping for a tight, action-packed, series-defining episode that would be easy to write about. It wasn’t a big hope, as hopes go, but I’ve got Thanksgiving prep stuff, and an easy review would have been nice…

The crew of the Fortunate weren’t the most sympathetic group ever to have popped up in the Trek universe. This was largely due to a misguided first officer put in a position of command for which he was ill-suited. This shouldn’t be unexpected. Having the wrong people in charge in certain situations, especially tense situations, is the norm.

Being a great leader is rare — which is why we can remember their names. They aren’t lost in the noise of mediocrity. Fortunately for those around them, those who are ill-prepared will usually err on the side of caution, trying not to make a mistake. It’s un-Fortunate (sorry) that Ryan isn’t that kind of guy.

So, the Fortunate’s situation wasn’t surprising. However, the Nausicaan reaction was.

From their restraint in its attack on the Fortunate, to their reluctant willingness to give Archer a way out of the mess, to their single-purpose rescue, the Nausicaans came out smelling like a rose in comparison to the boomers on the freighter.

Ignoring what we know of the Nausicaans from TNG (one stabbed the young Ensign Picard thus requiring the exchange of Picard’s heart for a bionic one), the only piece of information about their intent comes from Mayweather who says that they are pirates who attack ships in this sector. But are they pirates? Archer just took the word of a biased Ensign and didn’t seem to follow up on it. The Nausicaans attempting to protect their little corner of space from trespassers seems to be equally as valid, especially given their actions.

Their technology and number of ships are surely enough to deal with under-powered freighters. And yet the freighters manage to make it through. The Fortunate did, as did the Mayweather’s ship, the Horizon years earlier.

Later, the Nausicaans request the return of their lost crewman and show remarkable restraint in rescuing him. It was very reminiscent of rescues done by the Navy SEALS or Britain’s SAS. You do your mission, adapting to changing circumstances, and get out. They never pressed any of their advantages. Either they are tactically naive, or they have some agenda other than piracy and vengeance.

Ryan seems to be a typical space boomer; maybe a touch more fanatical than some, but cut from the same cloth. He views the ship as a self-sufficient family, and the space they travel in to be their province. Anything that interferes with who they are or what they want to do is cast aside for the greater good of their group.

From Ryan’s actions and Mayweather’s description of what it’s like to be a boomer, they start sounding more and more like the pioneers that set out across the North American continent a century or so ago. Going where they wanted without any regard for whose land they were on.

Ironic that this message comes a day before the American Thanksgiving holiday.

It’s easy to equate the Nausicaans with the American Indians, and the space boomers to the treaty-breaking white guys. Who knows, it might even be a fair comparison, but the fact is that we simply don’t know enough of the Enterprise-era Nausicaans to make that judgement. It comes across that the humans are pretty much travelling through space without asking for permission. It’s not a nice way to treat your neighbors. (It’s hard to figure how Starfleet becomes dominant in the Alpha Quadrant (maybe it’s through a cunning use of flags).)

That aside, Ensign Mayweather revealed a lot about his past, and character development is always good. Unfortunately, it was all in lengthy exposition — which was a major problem with this episode. Too many scenes with two people talking. The only one that even came close to being engaging was Mayweather’s talk with Archer.

Archer is becoming an enjoyable captain. While not the swashbuckler that Kirk was, he’s approachable in a way that Picard, Sisko, and Janeway were not. He is decisive, but not bull-headed. Shoot, he even let Mayweather talk-down the panicked and isolated Ryan before it was too late — though it might have been wise to not let his helmsman leave his station unmanned and wander around the bridge while the Enterprise was engaged in a ship-to-ship fight.

Given time, Archer could have made a friend of the Fortunate’s Captain Keene. While Keene’s family was been in the space freighter business for three generations, he’s able to keep things in perspective. A competent, level-headed sort — almost a foreshadowing of Archer years from now, assuming the Starfleet life doesn’t beat up Archer’s ideals too badly.

A big question is if a demotion of Ryan from first officer is proportional to his attempted murder of a number of Starfleet officers and assorted aliens. Or was setting them adrift in a cargo hold after burning a hole in the hull just a little hijinx?

As a reflection of the growing trust between Archer and T’Pol, when the science officer mentioned the need for rescue from the cargo pod, Archer didn’t argue the point. During their first couple of missions, there would have been at least a withering glare between the two.

T’Pol did have one great moment: playing witless foil during the little game of hide-and-seek. She understood the subterfuge, and apparently even the rules of the game. Perhaps Vulcan children play something similar.

It’s not to say that T’Pol had a perfect episode. Mayweather mentioned that the Y-Class freighters had twenty-three crew, but T’Pol didn’t raise an eyebrow when she scanned twenty-four bio signs. She could have at least made sure that all of them were human. She also failed to do a scan of the cargo pod to see if there was a Narsicaan in it before everyone had gotten sucked into Ryan’s trap.

TIDBITS, IRKS and QUIRKS

I loved the red herring of Mayweather and Ryan drooling over the transporter, and it was never used.

It seems that beam weapons of any kind are difficult to aim well. It’s amazing what terrible shots everyone is.

When will the Enterprise get either better weapons or some real energy shielding — like just about every other space-faring species? Those torpedoes aren’t doing it.

That first punch that Ryan threw at his Nausicaan prisoner was pretty damned weak.

Always great to see Porthos.

I liked the design of the Fortunate. Symmetrical but not aerodynamic. It actually looked like a space-faring vessel.

Captain Keene and Ryan were playing catch with a football. Finally, someone likes an ancient sport other than baseball.

And finally — Great to be here! Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!