Rogue Planet
I guess technically this is our second rogue planet of the cycle. And like Kirk before/after him, Archer is going to find something remarkable on the surface. An impossible figure from the past, who takes an inexplicable interest in him, and who bears a message important to all of us.
So let’s head on down.
Nothing New Under The Absent Sun
While the parallel to “The Squire Of Gothos” is too obvious to ignore, though, there’s not really many places we can go with it. Not when Trelane’s planet and its unexpected appearance was incidental to the proceedings.
Unsurprisingly, the rogue planet of “Rogue Planet” is rather more fundamental to its episode. Most immediately, there’s the use of the planet’s position to give us a world in which it’s always night. This isn’t an original idea – William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land was about what happens on Earth after the sun burns out, and that was published in 1912 – but it’s an interesting and fitting one for Trek to play around with.
There’s also clearly been some thinking about how such a planet could still support life. The abyssal ocean is used here for inspiration. Chemosynthesis, is the term; a method by which simple organisms create energy from chemicals rather than light, and thereby form the base of a food chain. Combine this with the horrifyingly hot temperatures generated by hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, and you can maintain an entire ecosystem, kilometres below the point at which the last tired photons flung from the sun finally give out.
Nor is this just hand-waving. It’s reflected in some of the designs for the local lifeforms, from the bioluminescent arthropods to the true form of the Wraiths themselves looking like nothing so much as deep-sea molluscs. There’s some major question marks hanging around all this, such as how a chemosynthetic system would still produce a breathable atmosphere, or how the vents could be powerful enough to warm an atmosphere to habitable levels without pumping out so much sulphur that everyone would choke to death within minutes of arrival. Whatever. Trek has used much worse science to justify far less interesting set-ups. Let’s just chalk all this up to dramatic license, and delve deeper into the forest. [1]
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
Firstly, let’s consider how smart the choice of a forest is in the first place. Again, this isn’t breaking new ground – Tolkien was making bank with this idea all the way back in The Hobbit. It certainly returns its power as an idea, though. Like its close cousin, the sunless city, the lightless forest works because it combines the lack of illumination with a sense of being shut in. Of shapes crowded all around you, ones you can’t really make out, but you know are there, blocking your escape.
Really, a forest works even better than a city in this regard, because the dark cities so beloved of, say, Alex Proyas still have some light, and because buildings and streets have a pattern to them, one utterly lacking in a dense forest. Shadows make more sense in a city. When buildings touch, it’s because they were designed to do so, not because they’re trying to claw each other to pieces so they can win the space made available when the loser dies.
I’m biased, I know. I grew up in a small town, almost surrounded by a huge pine forest. Walking through trees at night has always been one of life’s great pleasures. Even if you don’t have that emotional connection, though, the closeness of the foliage and the lack of sunlight have allowed the production designer to put together a set both claustrophobic and authentic. Add in the eerie glow of the crew’s night vision gear, and you have an episode that, if nothing else, can claim to be more visually interesting than most. It’s not hard to believe the Eska when they say a few days spent under the canopy in near-total darkness can have you seeing even those wraiths that aren’t real.
The setting is useful on a purely practical level as well – Enterprise was always a show that was more ambitious with its CGI than the technology could perhaps accommodate. I like to think that I’m past the point where whether or not a given effect looks “realistic” is of particular concern to me, of course. Even so, shrouding everything in darkness allows the episode to show off the drayjin and wraiths in the best, as it were, light.
“Lost In Space, And Meaning”
It’s possible that I’m tipping my hand a little by lingering on aesthetic considerations, though. Usually, I’m far more inclined to just jump straight into the pool of thematic considerations and start thrashing about. The reason for this departure from protocol is simple – there’s just not the depth here to let me dive as far down as I’d like to.
“Rogue Planet” feels a lot like its namesake, spinning around in its own little corner of the galaxy, light years away from anything else of relevance. We never return to the planet again, nor come back across the Eska. The themes of human boldness and Vulcan caution, and the resentment Archer feels over how the clash between them robbed his father of his dreams, are nowhere to be found. There’s nothing here that marks the episode out as being an episode only Enterprise could do, something rather borne out by how close this feels to a reskin (however pretty) of “A Private Little War”.
None of which is particularly disastrous, especially considering the recurrent plot arc of Vulcan/human culture-clash has fossilised, turning from being one of the show’s most interesting ideas to something of a millstone around its neck. At least we’ve taken a holiday from that. A greater issue here is the sudden emergence of the idea that Archer is searching for something, letting the Wraith pluck out his mental image of the woman from Yeats’ poem.
I suppose it’s reasonable to argue that seventeen episodes into a new show isn’t quite too long a time to suddenly reveal your main character has some kind of deep-seated need that’s led to a life of searching. If you’re going to go that way, though, you should probably actually specify what the thing they’re searching for actually is. Following up on it would be a good idea too. Instead, the idea is introduced on Dakala and abandoned the instant we leave. Archer’s quest for whatever feels as ephemeral and illusory as his visions the Wraiths grant him.
Jon Quixote
Let’s put aside the suddenness with which Archer’s quest appears and (apparently) disappears, though. What can we actually make of its deployment here?
Naturally, that rather depends on what he’s searching for – another reason why it would have been helpful for the episode to bother telling us. Based on the Yeats reference itself, Occam’s Razor suggests a hunt for a romantic partner (paralleling the Eska’s own motivations). Which I guess is entirely fair enough. It’s certainly a common enough goal, even among people who’ve chosen a career that might make it a difficult to achieve.
The problem with this is the use of “The Song Of Wandering Aengus” itself, a poem about a man who briefly glimpses a vision of his perfect woman, and wastes his life searching for her. It’s about how the search for perfection cannot end in anything but failure, as ridiculous as trying to find a woman that used to be a fish, so you can pick apples from heavenly bodies with her. Seeing the message of the poem as being “Don’t give up on your dreams!” misses the point completely. The perfect partner does not and cannot exist, and insisting otherwise just means a lifetime of disappointment, because no-one you find can ever match up.
I’m not saying that the secret to a happy life is to settle. I’m saying the very fact we have the concept of settling is a problem – one more way in which impossible dreams are sold to us, while the actual joys of life are sneered at as flawed.
The idea that Archer is searching for a perfect woman [2] isn’t a very satisfying one, then. At this point, though, the episode’s failure to specify the goal of his quest can be turned to our advantage. We can just make something else up.
So what else can we dream up as his end goal? What impossible dream can we think of that absolutely is worth pursuing, no matter the fact we’re never going to reach the end of the road?
That’s not a difficult question to answer at all. It’s the search for justice.
Close Of The Hunting Season
It’s here that “Rogue Planet” finally moves beyond being a fun extrapolation of niche science, and a neat series of interesting visuals. Archer is light years from back-up, with a single ship, looking at a generations-old cultural practice enacted by people wielding technology almost certainly superior to Starfleet’s.
And he decides he’s not going to let it stand.
There’s not a huge amount that he can do about it, for sure. The Eska are going to keep trying to murder the locals and take their bodies as trophies. This problem is bigger than Archer. But that just makes his determination to find some way to help more impressive. He doesn’t throw his hands up and walk away, just because he can’t fix everything. He fixes what he can. After which, his new Wraith friend tells him to keep searching for ways to help those who need helping. It’s not the kind of search that can ever actually end. There will always be somebody else who needs allies. Unlike the search for some impossibly perfect significant other, though, the search does good in itself, because you’re not rejecting imperfect good on the way, you’re helping others forge it.
I really like this reading, and how well it dovetails with the episode’s conclusion. That said, it’s hard to give “Rogue Planet” too much in the way of credit for it. It’s a lovely bit of headcanon, but it only exists because there's no actual canon to consider. There’s also a limit to how much I’ll celebrate a Trek episode doing exactly what Trek is supposed to do. Taking the side of the oppressed against their murderous oppressors is a baseline requirement in for fiction in general, in fact.
I mean, it’s all to the good that – unlike “A Private Little War” – no-one wastes time fretting over whether helping out is something our heroes are legally allowed to do. Even better, nobody in this episode is stanning for proxy wars in the name of Uncle Sam. Even so, it feels like we’ve been taken as far away from the general concerns of the show as a whole, simply in order to make the smallest step backwards possible from the grotesquely unacceptable stance of “Dear Doctor”. It’s like whispering an apology into a hole on a deserted beach and telling everyone you technically said sorry.
It would be ridiculous to blame “Rogue Planet” for Phlox’s worst moment, of course. But if you’re going to try and push back against so colossal a mistake, doing it on so small a scale and so far off the grid seems an odd way to go about it. Especially since you’re left wondering if the good doctor would have refused to help the Wraith had he decided the drayjin had the potential to snuffle their way to sentience.
All of which works as a dispiriting summary of where we currently are on Enterprise – its successes don’t feel like any more than we can reasonably expect, and its failures are far larger than can be forgiven from a franchise that’s had over fourteen years of continuous running to figure out how to make itself work. I remain resolutely opposed to the concept of “franchise fatigue”, but the latter word there genuinely seems appropriate here. This is a show that constantly finds itself fraying and tearing, all at too fast a rate to find time to repair the damage.
Ordering
3. (Ex Post Facto)
4. Rogue Planet
5. (The Infinite Vulcan)
6. Home Soil
(As with last time, the orderings from this point on will be in comparison with the median episode of those seasons we have already completed.)
Series Ordering
1. Deep Space Nine
2. The Original Series
3. Voyager
4. The Animated Series
5. The Next Generation
6. Enterprise
[1] I actually wish the episode had done more with the scientific or even pseudo-scientific possibilities thrown up by a land-based chemosynthetic system. That said, I’m aware that a) it’s not Trek’s job to cater to my idiosyncratic fascinations, and b) it was only two posts ago that I was complaining “Home Soil” got far too wrapped up in the concept of terraforming to remember to include an actual plot.
[2] Or man, of course. We’re not obliged to share T’Pol’s assumption that Archer wouldn’t find himself drawn to a mysterious man in his night-clothes. Particularly since her conclusion the word “nightgown” equates to “scantily-clad” says far more about herself than it does Archer.