“The Council”
Written by Manny Coto
Directed by David Livingston
Season 3, Episode 22
Production episode 074
Original air date: May 12, 2004
Date: February 12, 2154
Captain’s star log. We open in a massive expanse (ahem) of white-space. Various Sphere-Builders (including the emissary who talks to the Xindi Council) discussing timelines. Apparently some of them can see potential futures, and the number of ones in which Earth is destroyed are lessening.
Degra’s ship and Enterprise are proceeding toward the council chambers. There’s also a sphere nearby, and T’Pol believes she can access data from its memory core to help their case. She takes a team on a shuttlepod, including Mayweather to pilot, and Reed and Hawkins for backup, to infiltrate the sphere.
The female Sphere-Builder appears to Degra in holographic form on his ship, begging him to reconsider his actions. She tries to appeal to his legacy, but he says he’ll be judged by history, not by her.
When Degra returns to Enterprise, he explains the difficulty to Archer: the Sphere-Builders—the Xindi call them “the Guardians”—are practically worshipped. Degra himself raised his children to respect and admire them. So this is going to be a very hard sell. Archer, who has faced a Klingon tribunal, says he’s willing to face a tough room. (He neglects to tell Degra that said tribunal found him guilty and condemned him to life in prison…)
Degra also provides some information on the other councilors, expecting the Primate and Arboreal councilors to be sympathetic, with the Reptilians and Insectoids likely not to be. The swing vote is almost definitely going to be the Aquatics, who are deliberate and mercurial.
Archer and Sato join Degra in the council chambers, with Sato translating the Insectoid and Aquatic languages for Archer’s benefit. The Insectoids and Reptilians are completely unwilling to hear anything Archer has to say, assuming his evidence is manufactured so he can save his planet. The Guardians have never lied to them, they believe.
After the session ends, Degra has a suggestion for how to help convince the Aquatics. He needs the help of both Phlox and Tucker. Working with Tucker is complicated, but he and Degra come to something vaguely resembling the possibility of an understanding.
T’Pol, Reed, and Hawkins don EVA suits and head into the sphere while Mayweather keeps watch from the shuttlepod. Even as T’Pol downloads the data, some automated security arrives in the form of snakey probes. Reed and Hawkins fight off the security while T’Pol works, and then they all retreat to the shuttlepod. Hawkins is killed in the retreat, to Reed’s annoyance.
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Archer presents new evidence, this of the Sphere-Builder who tried to sabotage the Enterprise. While the Sphere-Builder himself was disintegrated, Degra is able to fabricate a holographic re-creation of him based on Phlox’s medical data. This is technology beyond what Earth has, so it can’t possibly be falsified by the humans. At this evidence, Kiaphet Amman’sor, the Aquatic councilor, and Dolim (to everyone’s surprise) are both willing to hear more (though the Insectoids still want Archer kicked out).
The council votes 4-1 to postpone the launch, with only the Insectoids voting against. Archer and Degra are encouraged by the support from Dolim. Tucker then swallows his anger and asks for Degra’s help installing the power cells that Degra gave them.
Dolim visits Degra in private and reveals that he knows that Degra destroyed a Reptilian ship. He stabs Degra, promising that—when the council is dissolved and the Reptilians rule all Xindi, he will track down Degra’s entire family and kill them, too.
Dolim freely admits in open council that he killed Degra. He and the Insectoid councilor announce that they have taken possession of the weapon. However, the weapon requires three codes to launch it, and each Xindi race has one of those codes—which means that the Reptilians and Insectoids only have two. Dolim says he knows that right before he and the Insectoids transport out of the chambers.
A firefight ensues in space with the weapon-transporting Insectoids and Reptilians on one side, the Primates, Arboreals, and Enterprise on the other. The former go through a subspace vortex with the weapon, but right before they do, they transport Sato off the bridge of Enterprise.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? T’Pol determines that the spheres have holographically camouflaged exhaust ports. She doesn’t bother to tell anyone this, just ordering Mayweather to fly toward what looks like a solid bulkhead. Why the exhaust ports are camouflaged on a sphere that’s already inside a cloaking field is left as an exercise for the viewer.
The gazelle speech. When Archer and Sato are first going to the council chambers, Archer says it reminds him of being sent to the principal’s office. Sato says that never happened to her, but Archer says it did happen to him once. Later, he finally confides the reason: he was passing notes to a girl, hoping to take her to a dance. She originally said no, but said yes after he got in trouble for passing her a note. Sato comments that some women like bad boys. Much like the speech for which this section is named, what promises to be an interesting bit of dialogue from Archer winds up being massively disappointing, and its relevance to the story at hand is questionable at best.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol is pleased to learn that the trellium-D is completely out of her system.
Florida Man. Florida Man Comes To Rapprochement With Bitter Enemy Right Before Bitter Enemy Dies.
Good boy, Porthos! Archer is snuggling with Porthos when he’s informed that Degra’s dead.
I’ve got faith…
“Ever since the attack on Earth, all I’ve thought about is getting back at whoever was responsible.”
“And now we are making peace with them.”
“I’ve gotten used to the anger. It’s going to be like, I don’t know, losing an old friend.”
“You have other friends.”
–Tucker trying to figure out how to process his anger, and Phlox giving sage advice.
More on this later… T’Pol quotes an old Vulcan proverb that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, establishing that Spock wasn’t just saying that in The Wrath of Khan, he was quoting an aphorism of his father’s people.
Welcome aboard. It’s the final appearance of two recurring regulars, Randy Oglesby as Degra (back from “E2”) and Sean McGowan as Hawkins (back from “Hatchery”), both of whom are killed. It’s the first appearance of four new recurring regulars: Andrew Borba and Bruce Thomas as two of Dolim’s subordinates, and Mary Mara and Ruth Williamson as two of the Sphere-Builders.
Other recurring folk include Rick Worthy as Jannar, Tucker Smallwood as the Primate councilor (both back from “E2”), Scott MacDonald as Dolim, and Josette Di Carlo as the Sphere-Builder emissary (both back from “Damage”).
With the obvious exceptions of Oglesby and McGowan, all of the above will be back next time in “Countdown.”
Trivial matters: Jannar, Dolim, and Kiaphet Amman’sor are first named in this episode. The Primate and Insectoid councilors still remain unnamed.
The medical data on the Sphere-Builder who sabotaged Enterprise in “Harbinger” is part of Archer’s evidence.
Archer references his being put on trial by Klingons in “Judgment” as a comp for confronting the Xindi Council. He’s more right than he realizes, as both occasions ended very badly for Archer…
When the Insectoid says something nasty to Archer in council chambers, he turns to Sato for a translation and she just says, “You don’t want to know.” That’s the same thing Sato said to Archer when the Klingon chancellor said something nasty to him in the empire’s council chambers in “Broken Bow.”
It’s been a long road… “Your traitorous bloodline will end at the tip of my blade.” One of the truisms of television is that you have to write in a proscribed time frame. Even now, when streaming services mean your episode doesn’t need to fix an exact timeslot, there’s still the specific proscription of how many episodes you have in a season. So even if you’re doing serialized storytelling, as is more common in 2023 than it was when Enterprise tried a full-season arc two decades ago, you’re still constrained by how many episodes you have in a season.
As we’ve seen in so many shows that have adopted serialized storytelling, that constraint can sometimes bite you on the ass. To give a Trekkish example, the second half of season four of Discovery dragged horribly because the story they had left to tell wasn’t suited to the number of episodes they had, so those episodes dragged somewhat.
Enterprise struggled mightily with this, as the Xindi arc did not have enough story meat for twenty-four episodes. This resulted in several filler episodes. In and of itself, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, far too many of those filler episodes were mediocre-to-bad—“Extinction,” “Exile,” “North Star,” “Similitude”—not aided by several of the plot-specific episodes not exactly lighting the world on fire.
The second half of the season, however, has been far better than the first. And while the digressions are sometimes annoying (“Hatchery,” “E2”), and sometimes enjoyable (“Doctor’s Orders”), the actual storyline has been much more compelling.
None more so than “The Council,” which is a thrill-ride of an episode that also moves the story along nicely. We start with our first real look at the Sphere-Builders, who apparently can see potential futures, and are working to make the future that favors them happen. We continue with Archer, aided by the Primates and Arboreals, trying to convince the other three members of the council that destroying Earth may not be the best idea.
The episode is fast-paced and enjoyable and intense and works nicely. I especially like Reed’s anger at Hawkins’ death, especially since, by his calculations, they have now passed the “acceptable” threshold of twenty percent casualties. Which Reed, to his credit, doesn’t view as acceptable at all.
Scripter Manny Coto falls back on a couple too many clichés, though. One is not entirely his fault: the general notion that the analogues of reptiles and bugs are the bad guys and the analogues of humans and cute furry animals are the sympathetic ones is a little too on the nose (and reductive). The other is Tucker coming to at least understand and sympathize with Degra just in time for the latter to be killed. Tucker’s struggle with his anger is a little too pat.
Still, this is a strong continuation of the climax of a story that has had a rough road, but is coming together nicely.
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido is a contributor to the upcoming anniversary anthology Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird, edited by Jonathan Maberry, celebrating the hundredth birthday of the long-running magazine. Keith’s story is called “Prezzo,” and features Italian immigrants, racial prejudice, and scary monsters. More info about the anthology can be found here.
