"The Seventh"

Written by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga
Directed by David Livingston


In which a terrible secret from T’Pol’s past is revealed when the Vulcan High Command orders her to retrieve a fugitive, and the crew of the Enterprise gets involved...

Synopsis - Analysis - Memorable Quotes - Observations


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Synopsis

As the episode begins, T’Pol is reading in bed when she gets a message from the Vulcan High Command. They have located someone named Menos, and they are certain that he has been correctly identified. Soon after, she stops to see Captain Archer and inform him that he will be getting a message from Admiral Forrest.

Vulcan High Command has made a request for T’Pol’s services on a matter of security, and Archer will be informed through Starfleet channels. She goes on to explain that she will require the use of a shuttle and a pilot for three to five days. Archer tries to get her to explain, but she refuses to answer.

Archer is told to set a course to a specific system, and he assigns Mayweather to be the pilot. Speaking with his command staff, Archer complains that even Admiral Forrest hasn’t been given details on the mission. T’Pol remains silent, despite the open hostility at the secrecy.

Later, in his quarters, Archer watches a water polo match while angrily smacking his ball against the wall. T’Pol asks to speak with him about a personal matter. Reluctantly, Archer agrees. T’Pol explains that before she joined the science directorate, she worked for the Ministry of Security. She was trained in recon retrieval about 17 years ago.

On a planet called Ageron, 30 years ago, the government wanted to forge relations with the Vulcans. To aid this process, the Vulcans took hundreds of agents and surgically altered them to infiltrate the various criminal factions working against the government interests. However, after the alliance was formed, 19 agents refused to be recalled from duty. A team of newly trained operatives was sent to retrieve the fugitives. T’Pol was only able to retrieve five of the six fugitives to which she was assigned.

T’Pol tells Archer this, despite her standing orders, because she wants him to come with her. The fugitive is dangerous, and she wants help from someone she can trust. Faced with that, even with a Vulcan ship coming to meet with Enterprise, Archer cannot refuse. Before they leave, Archer orders Trip to make sure the Vulcans don’t know that Archer has gotten involved. Trip is less than pleased.

On the shuttle to the planet, T’Pol shows Archer the dossier on Menos. Menos is believed to have joined a group of smugglers in developing and dealing in biogenic weapons. The last time T’Pol caught up with Menos was on Risa, several years ago. But T’Pol accidentally mentions that there was more than one person involves...something she then tries to cover up.

On the planet, they land near a small port during a heavy snowfall. Archer, Mayweather, and T’Pol carefully slip into the local bar, which is filled to the brim with people of ill repute. T’Pol quickly determines that Menos is somewhere in the building. They spread out, trying to find some sign of Menos. Archer orders Mayweather to stay by the door, to make sure Menos doesn’t try to get to his ship.

T’Pol spies Menos coming up behind her, but she gets pushed out of the way before she can grab him. After she tells Archer that she lost him, he jumps on a table and whistles. Sure enough, Menos fires at him, giving T’Pol some idea of his position. They try to get to him, but the other patrons and Menos’ cover fire gets in the way. Fortunately, Mayweather manages to take Menos down and restrain him until they arrive.

Back on the Enterprise, Trip invites Reed and Dr. Phlox to brunch in the captain’s mess. Phlox informs Trip that a virus has been detected on the ship, so the crew should be inoculated. Unfortunately, the remedy has certain unpleasant side effects. Reed follows that up with a request to take the engines offline. And that’s followed up with Hoshi informing him that the Vulcans have arrived. All in all, Trip doesn’t get a chance to enjoy his brunch.

Back on the planet, the postmaster informs T’Pol and the others that despite their jurisdiction, they cannot leave for several hours. The landing strip has been covered with acid to remove ice. Unfortunately, there is no place to put Menos in the meantime, so they take over a couple of tables in the bar, securing Menos to one of the tables.

Archer wonders if any of the people in the crowd might be working with Menos. T’Pol assures Archer that the Ministry of Security says that Menos works alone, but Menos suggests that it hasn’t always been so. T’Pol, in fact, has a flash of memory from her mission to Risa, where she seems to have been chasing Menos and another man.

Menos notes that Archer and Mayweather are human. He notes that the Vulcans wanted to take him home, to teach him to abandon the life he had been trained to assume. But then they assumed he was corrupt, and put him in a facility to “rehabilitate” him for three years. It’s no wonder, he muses, why he wanted to escape.

The past twenty years, he claims, has been spent hauling spent warp injector casings, and his health has been suffering as proof of it. He asks Mayweather to pull out a device from his pocket, and a hologram of his family appears. He figures that the injectors casings will take him from his family soon enough, so he doesn’t want to be sent to a Vulcan prison.

Archer wonder why Menos would worry about going back, if he’s innocent of the biogenic weapons charge. But Menos counters that he’s still guilty of running away and becoming a fugitive, one way or another. Still, Archer figures that he would be able to plead his case. Menos, on the other hand, worries that he would be shot to death first...and he alleges that T’Pol has been ordered to pull the trigger.

T’Pol has another flash of memory from Risa, of chasing Menos and the other man, and then being held down while writhing in pain during a ritual on Vulcan. Reacting violently at the sudden memory, T’Pol launches at Menos, slicing straps from his jacket. She’s positive that he’s lying, and she’s willing to check his ship to prove it. Wrapping the straps around her feet, she runs through the driving snow to Menos’ ship.

Once inside, she pulls open several large crates, expecting to find some sign of biogenic weapons. All the while, she recalls more and more of what happened on Risa. Apparently a man named Jossen was right behind Menos, and fell while T’Pol was chasing them. Inside the crates, T’Pol can only find the promised spent injector casings.

Back on the Enterprise, Trip is forced to respond to the captain of the Vulcan ship. Posing as Archer, he receives an urgent message from Admiral Forrest...the latest water polo scores! Recognizing the little joke Forrest is playing on the Vulcans, Trip comments that it’s a confidential matter!

Back on the planet, T’Pol returns and informs Archer about the injector casings. T’Pol asks to speak to Menos alone. Once Archer and Mayweather leave, T’Pol asks Menos who Jossen is. When Menos thinks T’Pol is playing games, she pulls her phase pistol on him. He explains that Jossen was another agent like him, and that she ought to know about all of it herself.

T’Pol swears that she wasn’t looking for anyone else. Menos explains that Jossen was innocent and didn’t deserve to be hunted down like an animal. T’Pol suddenly recalls killing Jossen, and Menos realizes that T’Pol doesn’t even have the memory of the act of killing. When it’s clear that she doesn’t seem able to handle the memory, Menos presses on, and asks her how she’ll repress the memory of what she’s about to do to him.

T’Pol staggers away and finds Archer, who orders Mayweather to keep watch. They step outside, and T’Pol explains that she was actually sent to retrieve seven fugitives, not six. When Menos and Jossen ran to escape on Risa, she tracked them down. Jossen fell and reached for his weapon, so T’Pol fired first and killed him. Afterward, she returned to Vulcan and resigned her position with the Minstry of Security.

Distraught by the act of killing, she went to the Sanctuary of P’Jem to seek some sense of balance. They performed an obscure and ancient ritual to purge both the memory and the emotion of the act from T’Pol’s mind. Until she received the new assignment, she hadn’t remembered Jossen’s part in the Risa mission at all, or the ritual performed to purge the memories.

T’Pol wonders if Jossen could have been innocent, in which case she wonders if she was guilty of killing a man who was just trying to defend himself from a baseless attack. Archer worries over what Menos might have been telling T’Pol. Before they can discuss it further, there is a sudden noise inside the bar. They rush in, and find their tables surrounded by flames. Mayweather explains that Menos knocked over the table, wanting to die free rather than be punished for crimes he never committed.

T’Pol jumps into the flames to help Menos, but when the roof begins to collapse, Menos escapes. Archer orders T’Pol to tell him which ship belongs to Menos, but she hesitates. Archer reminds her that she’s been sent to retrieve Menos, nut judge him. Finally, she relents, and takes them to Menos’ ship.

Once inside, it appears as though Menos is not on board. They search the vessel, but find nothing. Archer order Mayweather to power up life support while they discuss the situation. T’Pol determines that Menos could have left in any of the other vessels, and suggests telling the Ministry that Menos escaped. Archer thinks she’s giving in a little too easily, and that Menos is trying to get T’Pol to remember events differently to question her own loyalties.

Mayweather calls Archer to the bridge, and notes that there’s something odd on the center console, where a lot of energy is pulsing through one of the panels, despite the ship being powered down. Archer figures that the best way to find out what it does is shut it down, and when he does, a cloak disengages in the back of the cargo bay...where Menos is hiding, a weapon pointed directly at T’Pol.

Claiming a need to survive, Menos orders Archer and Mayweather to set down their weapons and step into a storage locker. Once they comply, Menos sends T’Pol over to secure the locker. But when T’Pol steps up to the door, Archer pushes it open hard, grabbing his weapon on the way to the floor. A short firefight ensues, but Menos cries out in surrender when the shooting gets close to his position. Archer sends Mayweather over to tie Menos up, but then Menos pulls open a trap door, and slips out of the ship onto the landing strip.

Archer and T’Pol quickly follow, and T’Pol gets the drop on Menos. Menos tries to get T’Pol to let him go, claiming that she won’t shoot another innocent man. But then Archer reminds her that she was sent simply to retrieve Menos, not judge him. Trusting Archer, T’Pol fires and knocks Menos to the ground.

Once Menos is in custody, they return to his ship, where Mayweather explains why Menos wanted them to stop firing weapons. Hidden in a secret storage compartment is a large stash of biogenic toxic material. It’s clear that Menos was playing on T’Pol’s fragile emotions over killing after all.

Back on Enterprise, after Menos is turned after to the Vulcan ship, Archer orders Trip to resume travel. Trip tries to get a story out of Archer, but Archer keeps mum. T’Pol stops by Archer’s quarters, and it’s clear that dealing with the memory of Jossen will be difficult. But her experience with humans has given her more perspective on dealing with those kinds of memories. Still, she wants Archer to know that if he ever needs someone to trust, she’ll be there...just as he was for her.


Analysis

Since the beginning of the series, it has been clear that the Vulcans before the inception of the Federation were a very different people from the Vulcans during Kirk’s time. These Vulcans still maintain that “repressed emotion” culture that everyone knows so well, but there is a definite streak of superiority running through everything they do. More to the point, they seem to believe that they know how to do things so much better than everyone else that they don’t mind interfering, so long as they can do it within specified “protocols”.

The interesting side to this practice becomes part of the focus of this episode. In earlier episodes, there’s been evidence of Vulcan interference on Coridan and a bit of unethical spying on the Andorians. But what is described here is interplanetary intrigue on a massive scale. If anyone had ever thought the Vulcans capable of sending over a hundred deep-cover agents to masquerade as criminals, all to undermine opposition to a Vulcan-friendly government, then that person got lucky.

As if that suggestion weren’t enough of a clue that these Vulcans have a long way to go before they resemble the more peaceful and enlightened society of Kirk’s time, there is the very fact that a Ministry of Security even exists. This is simply not something one would expect, and seeing Vulcans willfully hunting down and killing their own rogue agents is a chilling thought.

Then there is the revelation that T’Pol was so guilt-stricken by her killing of Jossen that she needed to undergo an obscure ritual to purge the memory. What’s interesting here is that the ritual is obscure, and the dialogue suggests that it isn’t performed very often. So killing, at this point, is not something that overly concerns many Vulcans.

Contrast this with Spock, and the controversy among his own people over his enlistment with Starfleet. Despite recognizing that warfare is necessary in some cases, the Vulcans of Spock’s time see willful military action as distasteful. Spock is the first Vulcan to serve aboard a vessel commanded by a human as a part of Starfleet, and there is often mention that other Vulcan-commanded ships are science vessels with only minimal defensive capability.

It could very well be that T’Pol is becoming what the Vulcans are meant to be. In this era, there is no talk of IDIC or the appreciation of the contribution of other species, except when it is incredibly convenient. This concept seems to blossom post-Federation, and T’Pol seems to be swaying towards that philosophy by admitting that humans have given her some sense of how to manage emotions to a more practical degree.

Of course, if this is true, then there is a great deal of irony involved. After all, in Kirk’s time, Spock and other Vulcans make a lot of noise about human emotional outbursts. Wouldn’t it be interesting, then, to discover that it was working with humanity to develop the Federation that led to a more serene and emotionally balanced Vulcan society?

That side of the equation would also appear to balance out the ongoing lessons in interplanetary politics that the Vulcans are grudgingly imparting to Starfleet. Archer, as recent episodes have aptly demonstrated, still has a lot to learn, and T’Pol is one of the few voices of reason on Enterprise. With both of them teaching each other the value of their respective societies, that goes a long way towards demonstrating a long-term arc for the series itself.

(An interesting bit of conjecture…could Archer and T’Pol be moving towards an eventual union, possibly the first interspecies marriage? That could have led to Sarek and Amanda getting married during Kirk’s time, since it would make sense for Sarek to have been involved in early Federation politics and know about the T’Pol discoveries. It would also explain why Spock, as a hyrbid, is still seen with some suspicion, since it would only be 100 years since the first example of interspecies breeding.)

Moving to T’Pol herself in this episode, her moral dilemma is well executed, if a little predictable. A close examination of the incident on Risa shows that Jossen was in fact armed, and likely attempting to defend himself. If Menos was as good at manipulating Jossen as he was at manipulating T’Pol, then Jossen could have been under the impression that T’Pol was chasing them for less than legitimate reasons.

In that case, T’Pol was certainly justified in shooting Jossen, though it could be argued that she could have wounded him or otherwise left him alive. That shadow of doubt is more than enough to explain T’Pol’s guilt over Jossen’s death, and it gives the episode a strength that has been lacking of late. Also, despite the usual cloying dialogue here and there, Archer regains some of the command presence that was undermined in “A Night in Sickbay”.

The one drawback of this episode was the obvious nature of Menos’ guilt. Regardless of the explanations given during the early acts of the episode, there’s little doubt that Menos will turn out to be guilty of the crimes for which he is accused. Granted, as Archer says, whether or not Menos is guilty is beside the point. But it does make it that much harder to buy into T’Pol’s crisis.

Still, that is a minor nit for an episode that manages to speak volumes about the state of Vulcan society in pre-Federation days, and take the trust between Archer and T’Pol to a new level.


Memorable Quotes

ARCHER: “You know, if the Vulcan High Command doesn’t approve of the water polo match I’m watching, I could find another...”

VULCAN CAPTAIN: “You seem rather young for a Starfleet captain.”
TRIP: (weak smile) “Healthy living...”


Observations

- Once again, the writers treat the teaser like it’s some horrible obligation that they need to get past to start the episode...

- Gee, the Enterprise isn’t nearly so sturdy as I thought. Just bouncing a ball off the wall makes it move!

- I love it when T’Pol forces Archer to pay attention to her by stepping in front of his water polo match...

- Bruce Davison did a great job as Menos. Davison, of course, has been in a number of genre roles, most recently having played Senator Kelly in “X-Men”.

- If the de-icing acid was so dangerous, then why wasn’t it a certain when the bar was clearing out after the fire?

- Could Archer have delivered that line about “dealing with painful memories and moving on” any more awkwardly?

Overall, this episode gives us a deep look into the darker practices of the Vulcan society, and the effect that it has had on T’Pol. Though there were some elements of the episode that could have been better, the strength of the characterization outshines the flaws.

I give it an 8/10.


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