Enterprise 0114 – Sleeping Dogs

Originally posted to ScoopMe! on January 30, 2002

LEAD-IN

Sleeping Dogs : A Whole Lotta Gas

What’s worse than a ship full of unconscious Klingons…other than the smell?

SYNOPSIS

Reed monitors Hoshi as she takes target practice with a phase pistol she needs to train with. Practice ends when the Enterprise drops out of warp to investigate a class-nine gas giant planet. A probe discovers a ship with biosigns deep in the upper atmosphere.

Phlox gives Reed a drug to ease the symptoms of a cold. Reed and the doctor muse about how Reed could have gotten a cold on a seal space ship. Phlox prescribes bed rest, but Reed can’t as he’s been assigned to the away team to explore the mysterious ship.

Hoshi visits Archer and says that she’s finally gotten her space legs so she volunteers for the away mission. This is convenient as T’Pol has already requested Hoshi’s assignment to the team.

Hoshi shows some bravado as she and T’Pol banter while donning their environment suits. This brave face starts to melt slightly as the ride through the atmosphere is a little rough. They find the ship.

On the ship, the away team finds a breathable atmosphere. Reed is the first to loosen his helmet, but his cold saves him from the oppressive smell that momentarily stuns both T’Pol and Hoshi.

From the writing on the bulkheads, it’s quickly discovered that this is a Klingon ship. T’Pol wasn’t familiar with the design of this Raptor-class vessel. The team heads toward the bridge and finds several living but unconscious Klingons. The humans want to help, but T’Pol wants to simply let them be Klingons and die with honor — especially since if the Klingons awaken, then the away team is dead. Some information is sent to Archer, but communications goes out. While the away team discusses their next step, a female Klingon lures Reed into an ambush and escapes the ship in the shuttle pod, stranding the Enterprise’s team.

Archer is surprised when the shuttle zooms out of the atmosphere and heads out into space, all the while the Klingon shuttle-jacker is broadcasting for Klingon assistance to attack their enemy — the Enterprise. Archer uses grapples to capture the shuttle. The Klingon requires more effort from a security team before she is subdued and captured.

Archer wants to take another shuttle to rescue his crew, but the Klingon ship has descended too far. Archer orders Maywether to polarize the hull plating — he’s taking Enterprise in.

On the Klingon bridge, Hoshi’s linguistic talents are brought to the fore as she starts translating various console messages. Seems that the Klingons have exotic weapons, such as photon torpedoes, that Reed hasn’t even heard of. Eventually they find the helm controls, but unfortunately there is a problem with the fusion manifold, so they aren’t going anywhere. Hopes rise when the Enterprise approaches, but the pressure is too much for the ship’s hull — the Enterprise has to retreat.

The Klingon woman is held in restraints in sickbay. She has a neurotoxin in her bloodstream, brought on by a virus, that is killing her. Archer tries reasoning with her, but he can’t get passed her certainty that the humans infected her ship. Archer comments to Trip, “Remind me to stop trying to help people.”

Trip thinks that adding braces to a shuttle might make the hull strong enough to survive another rescue try.

On the Klingon ship, a log entry points to a plasma injector being the propulsion problem. The away team heads out to find it.

Meanwhile on the Enterprise, Tucker and Archer are bracing the shuttle. Trip suggests that in order to get the Klingon’s cooperation, the captain needs to understand them better and start thinking like a Klingon.

Trip nearly faints as he’s working on repairs — his cold and dehydration are catching up to him. Hoshi and T’Pol go in search of water. In the mess/galley, they find dead Gagh, animal carcasses, and a room of very live Targs. As her fears catch up to her, Hoshi confesses that she sometimes envies T’Pol’s ability ignore their feelings. In a surprise move, T’Pol helps calm Hoshi with a Vulcan technique which she offers to teach her how to do herself. Hoshi’s moment of calm is tested as the ship’s hull starts to buckle. There isn’t enough time to fix the engines.

Archer took Trip’s suggested and has studied up on the Klingons. He uses this knowledge to talk with the Klingon woman again. He convinces her that the spoils from one of their raids was the source of the infection. With that, and the threat of dishonor, he wins her cooperation.

Hoshi’s risky plan of using the Klingon’s photo torpedoes to generate blast waves to raise the ship’s altitude which not only buys them more time, but raises them enough that Archer and the Klingon can dock with the shuttle. With her (officer Bu’kaH) help, the Klingon ship, Somraw, is sufficiently repaired to return to orbit.

Once the immediate danger is passed, the Somraw’s captain blusters as only Klingons can, but Archer gives as good as he gets as the Somraw is in no condition to put up a fight. After the Klingons back down, Archer orders the Enterprise out of the area before the Birds of Prey show up.

In decontamination, T’Pol, Hoshi, and Reed relax. T’Pol even feigns a headache to buy them another half-an-hour from the doctor. T’Pol concedes that it’s pleasant to be clean again — no more smells.

FADE OUT

ANALYSIS

With but one nit-picky exception, this was a finely-crafted and delivered episode. For three non-sweeps episodes, we’ve had good character development from the regulars, the technobabble is kept within reason and isn’t just a plot device, and the danger was a fair SF danger that didn’t rely on the bumpy-foreheaded-alien-of-the-week (BFAOTW).

This time, it was T’Pol who got the serious development. For perhaps the first time in the series she felt like a character you could truly care about, and one that you would be willing to trust in a crunch.

I was floored by the scene in the decontamination room. Never mind that the trio of T’Pol, Sato, and Reed were in their skivvies. Unlike in the first episode, this go ’round seemed so appropriate and natural that the crew’s state of (un)dress was barely noticeable.

What was noticeable was what on Vulcan must pass for wanton emotionalism. First, T’Pol sides with her crewmates in a subterfuge to allow them all to stay in the relaxing confines of the decontamination chamber. This is hardly logical. She is making the doctor perform more work for no reasonable gain — and may in fact delay him from other duties. Shirking the legendary Vulcan work ethic also defies the strict dictates of Vulcan logic as we’ve come to know it. (Although, Vulcans have a talent to mold any selfish desire to their own logical purpose.)

She freely admitted to humans that she found the decon chamber to be pleasurable. Pleasure? That seems rather emotional, no? But that wasn’t the biggest revelation.

Hoshi: “Do you smell that?”

T’Pol (sniffs): “I don’t smell anything.”

On the surface, this seems to be a commentary about the cacophonious assault of aroma that they endured on the Somraw. If we dig deeper, there is much more being said. T’Pol didn’t smell anything… in a closed room with two humans. As was made unambiguously clear in “The Andorian Incident”, Vulcans find the odor of humans offensive. Not as pungent, perhaps, as a band of Klingons, but certainly a smell that would make them take a shower as soon as possible. And yet, T’Pol didn’t smell anything.

The second biggest shocker was how T’Pol bonded with Hoshi when the communications officer had her anxiety attack. This was a moment nearly as profound as when Kirk and Spock revealed their inner selves in “The Naked Time“. Hoshi opened herself up to T’Pol, and in return, and in a moment that stunned the heck out of me, T’Pol turned all nurturing. Not the kind of nurturing, necessarily, that will spawn a gaggle of ‘shippers, but very much like that of a big sister coming to the aid of a little sister.

It was much more than the mind exercise. It was the character’s demeanor. He edges softened, and she let down her guard. And still, she remained all Vulcan. The offer to help Sato learn how to invoke her own calming was ice cream on the pie. It was more than trying to make a fellow crewmember more efficient/effective, it was a genuine caring for the well-being of another.

I thought it was also telling when Reed and Hoshi essentially took all of the initiative for “thinking outside the box” in order to stay alive. T’Pol seems to recognize the Vulcan limitation of spontaneity. A lot of Vulcans have died because they took too long to think through a problem instead of acting on impulse (no pun intended — I’m just warped). Even though she is the highest ranked officer on the away team, she largely deferred to the humans.

In this vein, kudos must also be given to Reed. The photo torpedo shock-wave gambit was Hoshi’s idea. Even though she was the lowest ranked away member, her idea ruled the day because nobody any anything better. That’s maturity. At the beginning of the episode he was the teacher, but here he was willing to let the student lead.

And what about that leading, eh? Hoshi spewed a lot of bravado on the way to the Klingon ship, but still had her fears. In some ways she was trying to be like her surrogate “big sister” T’Pol. I laugh in the face of danger, hahahaha! Well, not quite. But when crunch time came (literally, as luck would have it), her survival instinct kicked in. She wasn’t ready to die — at least not without a fight. I mean, six photo torpedoes detonating at five hundred meters? That’s just insane.

Speaking of dying, fighting, and insane, how about Bu’kaH? I wanted so much to go, “Yea!”, but she really was little more than the hiss and spit Klingons that have been the norm ever since their heads went all bumpy. Frankly, I’m getting a little tried of it since there have been some many better examples, most on the original series. Kor was devious. Kang was beligerant, but reasonable. Mara, our first glimpse of a Klingon woman (and Kang’s wife and science officer) was also a thinking being; and while very devious Lursa and B’Etor followed in her footsteps well — demonstrating that bumpies don’t necessarily make you an epithet-spewing cartoon.

I ramble. Sorry… sore point.

But it was this one-dimentionalness that also threw the one monkey wrench into the works. The Klingon captain, his crew having been weakened by a virus, and then largely saved by a group of humans and a vulcan, can’t be facing much in the way of honor. He’d want to die a glorious death in battle — if only to preserve the honor of his family name, and the same for his crew. He would egg Enterprise on to destroy him, or better yet, be destroyed in the process. After all, what’s the point of living if you don’t have enough honor to go to Sto-Vo-Kor?

Well, there it is. Another good episode for Hoshi, and a great episode for T’Pol. Maybe someday Mayweather will actually get to leave the bridge.

TIDBITS, IRKS, AND QUIRKS

* “gagh is best when served live.” – A Matter of Honor

* Archer’s still getting more clues: “Remind me to stop trying to help people.” The ship might just survive yet.

* So, targs are pets AND food. But then, you have to feed and clean up after the targs. Seems like a huge expense for a space ship, but then again so does barrels of blood wine.

* Why send your sick armory officer on an away mission when you have a perfectly healthy chief engineer to go instead?

* From the first episode to now it’s very obvious that Vulcans are quite content to let sleeping Klingons lie.

So, am I right or am I wrong? Have I awakened any closeted T’Pol/Hoshi ‘shippers? Did I miss a bigger picture? Should Porthos be worried that he’s only a targ-like emergency ration? Where did the phrase “Let sleeping dogs lie” originate from? Post your thoughts on the message board.

Qapla’