Date: Unknown
Under attack from Nausicaan pirates, the first officer of the Earth Cargo Ship Fortunate decides to take matters into his own hands. Unfortunately for him, with the advent of Enterprise's launch, the interstellar freight trafficking spaceways are changing - and Starfleet is seemingly eager to expand its field of jurisdiction.
Summary
Admiral Forrest contacts Archer in the middle of the night to give him some unpleasant news: Enterprise is being turned around to investigate an automated distress call from the ECS Fortunate. When the Enterprise arrives, they find a ship floating in a sea of debris. Taking a shuttlepod over, Archer, Reed, Phlox and Mayweather - the ship's resident "Boomer" - find first officer Ryan Cross in command, his captain having been injured in an assault by Nausicaan pirates. Although Cross initially declines Archer's offer of help - a junior officer panicked and hit the emergency distress beacon, he says - he acceded to letting Phlox examine his captain and letting Tucker supply the cargo ship with spare parts. Crewman Shaw questions his decision to let Starfleet crewmen aboard, his reasons soon becoming obvious: the crew of Fortunate have taken a Nausicaan prisoner, and are beating him senseless in an attempt to obtain the shield frequencies for the vessel that has been attacking them.
While Tucker synthesises new parts for the Fortunate, Mayweather buys Cross lunch. What begins as a nostalgic conversation turns to discomfort for the ensign which Cross bluntly questions him as to why he abandoned his freighter family for Starfleet. Meanwhile, on the Fortunate, T'Pol detects an anomalous life sign: an injured Nausicaan. Archer confronts Ryan about the prisoner. Despite the crewman's protestations that Starfleet has no jurisdiction over what goes on aboard his ship, he allows Archer to see the alien after the captain threatens to remove all of the spare parts that Tucker has installed on the cargo ship. Or so it seems: Ryan and Shaw lock Archer, Reed, T'Pol and Phlox in one of the cargo holds, breach it with their rifles and jettison it. Enterprise is unable to stop Fortunate as she warps away, and valuable catch-up time is lost as the away team are retrieved.
Enterprise begins to track a faint warp trail, unable to confirm that it is the Fortunate's after the cargo ship's plasma cannon knocked out the Starfleet vessel's long-range sensors. Mayweather expresses concern that the Starfleet crew may not be handling the situation correctly, but Archer states that humans have a code of behaviour that they have to adhere to, whether they are born on Earth or on a cargo vessel. On Fortunate, Ryan manages to beat the shield frequency codes out of his prisoner, and the cargo ship soon tracks the Nausicaans who attacked them to a nearby asteroid. Unfortunately for them, the asteroid turns out to be a Nausicaan outpost, and the codes which the prisoner "revealed" are false. Three Nausicaan vessels attack and disable Fortunate, with several pirates boarding her in search of their crewmate.
Enterprise arrives, its long-range sensors restored, and Archer attempts to talk the Nausicaan captains down. The aliens agree to let Archer try to talk Ryan into letting his prisoner go, but he is adamant that he won't let Starfleet dictate to him. Mayweather tries to reason with Ryan, asking him what will happen to the next freighter crew that runs into the Nausicaans, trying to make him see that his actions will only make things worse for any humans in the sector. Ryan eventually gives in, turning the prisoner over to the Nausicaan invaders. When Captain Keene recovers, he reduces Ryan in rank to able crewman.
Review
In common with "Civilisation", it would seem that "Fortunate Son" misses the boat somewhat. The main thrust of the story is largely glossed over, seemingly in preparation for later episodes, and a minor character given his first chance to shine comes off as at best insubordinate and at worse inadequately represented - in terms of writing and acting skill. Enterprise seems to be suffering a bit of a blip.
Problems were always going to arise in the course of The Powers That Be trying to learn from their mistakes on Voyager and fleshing out the minor characters. They scored in the positive with Ensign Sato in "Fight or Flight", but have yet to really involve Lieutenant Reed in any meaningful way. If Travis Mayweather is going to avoid coming down with a terminal case of Harry Kim Syndrome, then his character background needs to be addressed quickly and firmly. Full marks, then, to Berman and Braga for devoting an episode to Earth cargo ships, the "family" from which Mayweather originates. Less than full marks, though, for the way in which the different threads set up in this episode - and they are many - collide and compete with one another. The result is a curious mass which it is difficult to draw conclusions about Mayweather from.
For a Briton, this episode's wider theme should have a special significance. Essentially, "Fortunate Son" is about the death of a way of life. The erosion of the rural lifestyle in the wake of financial deprivation, foot and mouth disease, dismissive governments and burgeoning urbanisation in the United Kingdom is a fascinating mirror image of the changes which the cargo ship crews of the Alpha Quadrant find themselves undergoing. Faster ships, improved technology, imperious Starfleet crewmen and vessels and a changing political structure serve to hold a mirror up to the changes modern society faces and is going through. But this episode doesn't really carry those themes through, even though they form the backbone of the episode, giving Ryan his motivation to capture and torture an enemy. Instead, the writers have been forced to juggle the obvious societal changes with character exposition - an endeavour which isn't entirely successful.
Part of the reason is that - and it pains me to say this - Mayweather, up until this point, has not been a very interesting character. This is Anthony Montgomery's first chance to shine and I'm sorry to say that, on the whole, he disappoints. I'm not sure whether, in preparation for this episode, Montgomery decided to watch a lot of Avery Brooks' performances for DS9, but his laugh bears a striking resemblance to the erstwhile Captain Sisko's and his body language in the dinner scene with Cross is textbook Benjamin. His climatic speech, when he attempts to convince Ryan of the error of his ways, is poorly executed, with flat diction and some really odd emphasis on words. There's clearly a lot of potential in the character; the mention of the mysterious ECS North Star disaster and his latent regret at leaving his biological family behind in favour of his adopted Starfleet family is fertile ground. After this episode, though, there's a big question mark hanging over Montgomery's ability to pull off any character development. Any confusion over Travis' role won't be helped by the fact that Archer once again refuses to slap down one of his crew when they butt into a delicate negotiation; the ensign's intervention could have seriously swung the battle against Enterprise, but Archer's only response to his speaking out of turn was a mild glance. (That makes Mayweather's second uncalled for intervention - remember his "We just want to make you healthy!" in "Terra Nova"?)
As well as the changing nature of the spaceways and Mayweather's personal dilemma, "Fortunate Son" also attempts to throw in a protective first officer of a cargo ship who feels the need to take direct action to safeguard his way of life. First Officer Ryan Cross is a rebellious free-thinker in the tradition of The Next Generation's Captain Maxwell, or the USS Equinox's Rudy Ransom - a righteous persuer of truth and justice designed to engender our sympathies. Unfortunately for him, he comes off more like Equinox's sleazy, amoral first officer Max Burke: self-interested and dismissive of any overriding sense of human values. As Archer points out at the conclusion of the episode, his intentions were good, but his methodology was all wrong. Ryan's motivation - i.e., the changing way of life around him - simply isn't strong enough to justify capturing "enemy" crewmen, torturing them (in a scene strongly reminiscent of Ransom's interrogation of Seven of Nine, with added punching) and then persuing them to the point of endangering his own crew's lives. The changing freightways certainly aren't enough justification for trying to murder the senior staff of a Starfleet ship; I wanted to know why, at the conclusion of the episode, Archer wasn't demanding that Ryan be handed over to him so that he could return him to Earth for trial.
Of course, that would get in the way of the wider plot line which has been set in motion here. Keene's offer of a drink is to be taken up "next time"; his parting stare after Archer leaves the viewer in no doubt that we'll be seeing Fortunate and her crew again; Mayweather's personal problems remain unaddressed after his confrontation with Ryan in the galley; the Nausicaans are a continuing threat, as we know from their stabbing of Picard in The Next Generation. In fact, if there's one thing that this episode is good at, it's furthering the impression that Enterprise is the vanguard of a sea change in interstellar relations. According to Mayweather, three more NX-class starships are under construction. Archer warns the Nausicaans that they'd better remember Enterprise's class, because they're "not sneaking up on cargo ships anymore". Archer mentions deploying the first subspace communications amplifiers to Admiral Forrest. Curiously, Mayweather states that if Ryan were to join Starfleet, then he'd have more experience in space than most Starfleet captains. It's a shame that we didn't learn how long Ryan has been serving on the Fortunate, because then we'd have had an idea of just how long Starfleet has existed. It can't be much more, judging by Ryan's apparent age, than twenty or thirty years. Maybe this is a question that, as Starfleet continues to impinge on cargo ship affairs, will be answered. (And not before time.)
On the technical front, there are some plus points to this instalment. First off, the Nausicaan ships: insectoid, manoeuvrable and very, very cool. The Nausicaans themselves have undergone a bit of a (retro) makeover since their last appearance; they now appear less like the bar-room thugs they were in The Next Generation and more like WWE wrestlers, complete with leather jackets. Their "tough" quotient hasn't lessened, however - although I would question whether they would have left the Fortunate after they'd gotten their crewman back. Given their past history, I would have expected them to slaughter the crew. The other technical point I'd like to raise is sitting on Archer's desk: either he has a very large CD collection, or the props department has created a pre-TOS disk-style retrieval system, which is a nice sly reference. It certainly reassures me that the technical staff have a respect for the show's origins, even if the writing staff sometimes like to cast those origins aside.
"Fortunate Son" is a scene-setting episode. Here, we're arranging the scenery, and placing the pieces on the board. Whether the writers will investigate any of the themes they're throwing up here will be one of Enterprise's great litmus tests. Over the course of the next season, we'll see how the show progresses; in the meantime, this is a start, if a stuttering, confused one. |
