Oasis
One of the guiding principles of IDFC is that there exists almost no value in judging an episode by how similar it is to those that came before it. If your criticism can be replicated by dumping a wodge of episode synopses into a halfway decent comparison algorithm, then it isn’t good criticism. For most of human existence, our goal was to prove we were more than mere animals. Now, it’s to prove we can outperform AI-assembled click bait.
Even beyond that, though, prioritising “originality” (already a slippery word) as an indicator of quality just guarantees a downward trajectory to your work. It’s both bad criticism, and a bad way to actually engage with entertainment. I think that so strongly, in fact, that a major motivation for creating IDFC was to explicitly reject the idea that it makes sense to judge the later Trek shows by how often they throw out something reminiscent of where we’ve boldly gone before.
All that said, though, wow. Could “Oasis” possibly be more of a rip-off of “Shadowplay”?
Salvage Rights And Wrongs
Since “Shadowplay” is in Deep Space Nine’s second season, we’ve yet to cover it here. Were we to engage our hypothetical Star Trek Story Synopsis Similarity Searcher, though, the results might read a little like this: a remote settlement with a secret, an older man not telling our heroes everything, a younger female relative of that old man who bonds with one of the main characters, an attempt to rebuild a version of a now-lost home, almost everyone turning out to be holograms, and René Auberjonois dealing with separation issues.
It’s that last one that stings the most, in fact, particularly after December 2019, when “Oasis” suddenly became confirmed as the last contribution to the franchise that Auberjonois would ever make. While he’s as terribly good value here as he is everywhere else, then, it’s perhaps a shame that his last bow comprises of a pale re-tread of a story he already helped tell – indeed, Auberjonois pointed out the similarities himself while working on this episode.
Even there, though, “isn’t it a shame Auberjonois passed away” isn’t actually a critical insight, however undeniably true it is. Nor is pointing out that much of what differentiates “Oasis” from “Shadowplay” – a crewman finds himself fascinated by a young blonde woman who may not be all that she appears, and T’Pol is kind of a jerk about it – is instead rather reminiscent of “Rogue Planet”, broadcast just two episodes earlier. [1]
The reason why “Oasis” doesn’t work is something subtly different. It’s not the decision to rummage through the past which sinks the episode. There’s nothing inherently unattractive about the idea of recycling – or, given how this episode starts, perhaps we should call it salvaging. The problem comes when you decide that picking through the past is basically all anyone needs to do.
This has been a bad habit of Enterprise going back at least as far as “The Andorian Incident”, as we’ve seen. At least there you could understand the thinking, though – relying on nostalgia as a selling point is at least clearly something that works in general, as much as Berman and Braga demonstrated they didn’t really understand why. The laziness of “Oasis” is far more baffling. The episode isn’t just recycling a plot, it’s recycling a mystery. Or rather, and this is ultimately worse, it’s recycling the solution to a mystery. And when your entire episode is building on and outward from a central question of “what’s going on here, then?”, just copying and pasting the answer from an earlier episode becomes a much bigger problem than reusing plot elements would be in general. It’s like promising to cook us the most glorious meal for a dinner party, and then serving them last night’s leftovers. There’s nothing wrong with leftovers as a meal, and I probably would have happily come over just for food and some chat, but you chose to big up what you were offering, and the resulting disappointment is entirely on you.
As I say, the constant quest for “originality” in fiction is quixotic and even harmful, but when you promise originality, you’d damn well better deliver.
Mysterious Goals
All of that simply switches us to a new question, though. Namely, is that a sensible way to look at “Oasis”? Is originality what it’s promising, or what it needs to deliver? Plenty of other mystery stories come to conclusions that stop some distance from being mould-breaking. Hell, people keep re-filming the exact same Agatha Christie stories every decade. Somewhere in the order of ten million tickets have been sold for The Mousetrap in its seventy-year run at just one theatre. That’s 14% of the entire population of the country, which even taking generational change into account rather suggests people are happy to dip back in, even once the notoriously super-secret ending is revealed to them.
I think this comes down to a matter of eggs and baskets. The central mystery of “Oasis” doesn’t just come to a disappointing conclusion, there’s very little replay value to it. Sometimes one the biggest joys of a good mystery story is going back through after you know the ending, and seeing which clues you caught, which you missed, and which you misinterpreted. In seeing how well the author constructed a mystery that seemed impenetrable at the time, but is obvious in hindsight.
Then there’s all the other interesting ideas you can play around with while your mystery chugs along. I rather like the structure of Rian Johnson’s mystery in Knives Out. That said, it’s the story of how Marta Cabrera deals with the impossible situation she’s found herself in, and the resultant fallout as the white family she works for no longer sees any advantage in feigning respect for her, that makes it more than a Christie permutation for a country not all that familiar with her work.
With “Oasis”, alas, we cannot say similar. There’s not enough complexity for a review of the clues to satisfy. Mostly they’re fairly generic nods to the fact things aren’t adding up, rather than actual puzzle pieces. I can’t deny the effectiveness of the scene where the crew cracks open what proves to be Shilat’s tomb; it’s both an arresting, unsettling visual and a reveal that suddenly knocks the episode into a new orbit. I always like my mysteries at least slightly horrific, and my horror at least slightly mysterious. Even there, though, the instant we learn Shilat is already dead, the question simply becomes whether the people on the planet are androids, holograms, or aliens.
And what do we get besides the central mystery? Trip and Liana flirt a little, and T’Pol is obnoxious about it. If you’re a fan of the romance-of-the-week format, then I’m not about to yuk your yum, but personally I don’t see the appeal. And certainly, T’Pol’s unpleasantness sours all the talk of marshmallows and ice-cream. I said when I covered “Unexpected” that T’Pol’s attitude towards Trip’s tendency to seek romance among the stars smelled of slut-shaming and worse, so it’s not a lot of fun to be reminded of it here. Especially since it undermines the show’s general drift toward the Vulcan Science Officer developing a mutual respect with Archer and Tucker.
Shadow Boxing
Is there anything we can salvage from this dark little ship on this dark little world? There are certainly a few nice touches. D’Marr is both fun company and a very nice design, for instance. But it’s the darkness itself that’s the strongest point here. As my comments on Shilat’s resting place suggest, this is a nice dip back into the horror well, last drawn from in “Silent Enemy”. As with that episode, that’s not a choice which can save proceedings, but a little spice can do wonders for a bad meal, even if it can’t actually make it into a good one. There’s plenty of atmosphere as our crew creep through shadow-filled corridors to investigate D’Marr’s “ghost ship” – you can see why Mayweather digs this kind of thing. These same dark corners also contribute to the sudden shock of Ezral enabling the “remorseless killer” subroutines in his simulated friends. The idea of these lost, lonely sailors suddenly becoming an unstoppable, implacable threat is one with juice, and you can feel the panic start to mount as Archer realises he’s up against an enemy as unconcerned by bulkheads as they are phaser blasts.
This is one of the strongest parts of the episode, in fact. Not just the attack itself, nicely staged as it is. The basic idea of creating holographic soldiers is one you can imagine the post-Voyager franchise being able to do something potentially quite interesting with. Plenty of sci-fi stories have considered the moral implications of creating beings that only exist to fight for you. But how does the calculus on that change (if at all) if you can render those beings are essentially unhurtable and unkillable?
(Actually, this raises a larger question, which is why 24th century Starfleet doesn’t have emergency security holograms to repel boarders, fight in vacuum-exposed corridors, and so on. As my friend and fellow blogger @runalongwomble pointed out, though, the Federation has enough problem with giving holograms weapons on the holodeck, without letting them tear about the ship waving phaser rifles. No-one who read the Enterprise’s report on the events of “A Fistful Of Datas” is likely to conclude that what was missing was the ability for the Data-faced gunslingers to run riot through the rest of the ship.)
Nothing actually gets done with this idea, though, beyond using it to set up another Enterprise shoot-out. A more interesting one than most, admittedly, but it’s still an opportunity missed. I said above that “Oasis” adds very little to the basic idea of “Shadowplay”, but the problem is just as much in what little has been added. I’m not sure it would be completely fair to dismiss this as just “Shadowplay” with sex and guns, but it’s certainly at least mostly fair. Not least because of how well this describes the approach Enterprise is taking more generally.
Chant Du Cygne
The only possibly hope for the episode to escape the crater it’s ploughed itself into comes in Act Four, once the mystery has been revealed and we move on to the resulting fallout. It would be stretch to call Ezral’s daughter turning out to not also be a hologram a twist. Only people familiar with “Shadowplay” would even be expecting otherwise, after all. Still, learning Liana – unlike Rurigan’s daughter – is flesh and blood does change the emotional thrust. Ezral isn’t hiding, he just hasn’t been able to leave. Now that the option presents itself, though, he’s unwilling to uproot himself from twenty-two years of accumulated soil.
As I’ve said, Auberjonois does as well as anyone could in selling this completely, because of course he does. Unfortunately, though, there’s just not wares available for him to (Tarkalean) hawk. Partially this is down to a careless set-up. Trip’s impassioned condemnation of Ezral’s attitude can’t quite distract from the fact that his central dilemma here isn’t whether or not to return home, but whether or not he allows Archer to provide him with the option to return home at some point in the future. Maybe I’ve spent too much time teaching decision theory, but it’s hard for me to get too worked up about someone fretting over whether to accept an additional option, which closes down none of the options already available.
But there’s also the issue that with the central mystery resolved, “Oasis” seems to consider its job more or less done. Auberjonois has only two brief scenes to pitch his initial intransigence and later change of heart. It’s like watching a moral quandary on fast-forward, sped through as quickly as possible now the important business of dough-eyes and phaser blasts is concluded.
The result is an episode which not only wastes a half-decent premise of holographic soldiers – which is forgivable – but Auberjonois’ last contribution to Star Trek – which absolutely isn’t. It’s true that watching “Oasis” after 2019 provides an accidental, additional parallel within the episode. Just like Ezral and Liana, we’re watching an old friend speak and move despite having passed on; a ghost we can revisit whenever we choose, but which we can never resurrect. All this does though, beside making me terribly sad, is underline how little semiotic density there is to the episode as written.
There’s no evidence that the quality of “Oasis” was the reason for Auberjonois never returning to the franchise, and I’m not pushing it as a theory. Even had he returned later in Enterprise, or even in Discovery, though, this would still be a poor episode. One doesn’t need the hindsight of knowing how precious Auberjonois’ time was here to recognise how much his time, and everyone else’s, is being wasted here.
The show at this point can hardly afford this. For a few cycles now, Enterprise and TNG have been duking it out for the wooden spoon in the first season rankings. What we’re seeing here is the initial shudder as the earlier show pulls away. As entirely unpleasant a person as Maurice Hurley apparently was, and as much as the show’s imperial phase required him being replaced by Michael Pillar, taking over showrunner duties gave the nascent TNG a desperately-needed shot in the arm.
Meanwhile, Enterprise is continuing to flounder. What’s worse, it doesn’t particularly seem to care. It’s one thing to bungle the execution of a decent concept, to try something different and realise too late it was never going to work, or even to realise you’ve hired a writer who isn’t going to prove a good fit. “Oasis” is something different, a lazy reskin of a much better episode that somehow seems proud of its laziness, basking shamelessly in its reflected glory, like Vanilla Ice aggressively side-stepping in place to that stolen Queen bassline. And it’s worth noting that while Stephen Beck wrote the teleplay, the story was put together in concert with the showrunners themselves. For all that Braga later called this episode “terrible”, there was presumably a point where “T’Pol gets bitchy during a DS9 re-enactment” sounded like the sort of episode their show should be doing.
You can’t turn things around until you realise you’re headed the wrong way. More than three quarters of the way through this first season, Enterprise still hasn’t realised it’s boldly going in completely the wrong direction.
Ordering
4. (Ex Post Facto)
5. (The Infinite Vulcan)
6. Oasis
Show Ranking (So Far)
1. Deep Space Nine
2. The Original Series
3. Voyager
4. The Animated Series
5. The Next Generation
6. Enterprise
[1] See also “ghostly figures show up on an inhospitable planet where the crew are surprised to find another ship and crew”, actually.