Trek-a-Day Episode 5: Terra Nova

Series: Star Trek: Enterprise
Broadcast Date: October 24th, 2001

Synopsis:

Opening with a staff meeting between Captain Archer, T’Pol, and Trip, Terra Nova sees the Enterprise investigating the fate of the first Human colony established outside our solar system. Mysteriously, the colonists stopped responding to Earth’s transmissions about seventy years prior, and this has Enterprise’s crew wanting to “crack the case”.

The crew takes a shuttle pod down to investigate and finds the colony completely abandoned. Archer and security chief Reed find an underground cave after Reed saw a creature on the surface and pursues it. The away team finds the creature, but there’s more than one down in the caves and they start firing guns at the team. During the exchange of fire, Reed is taken prisoner. Archer decides to fall back to the shuttle pod, where T’Pol gives the surprise information that the aliens are actually Humans.

Archer and Dr. Phlox return to the colony and speak with the Humans in the caves. It seems they call themselves Novans and resemble a primitive period in Humanity. While they have guns, the Novans seem to lack education and technology. Something has gone very wrong at this colony. Novans also hate Humans and don’t remember that they are Human. Archer and Phlox determine an elderly Novan is dying of cancer and they convince her and her son to come aboard Enterprise for treatment.

While the Novans are on Enterprise, Archer uses archived photos from the colony to prove to the Novans that they are Human. After the cancer is cured, Phlox notices that the two colonists aboard have signs of poisoning from their water supply, and so the crew goes back down to try and relocate the Novans to the other side of the planet. Archer and the lead Novan work together to save a wounded Novan below the surface, which helps to build trust. In the end, Reed is returned to Enterprise’s crew and the Novans are relocated to an area with a safe water supply and left alone, as they wished. Enterprise departs, having solved the mystery of Terra Nova.

Review:

I’ll be honest up front: After starting out strongly and setting up the mystery of the missing colony, Terra Nova runs out of gas quickly.

I’ll at least start with what works before I complain about what doesn’t.

Captain Archer is developing tremendously. Bakula was definitely the man for this role. There’s a moment of hesitation that Archer has in a briefing room meeting after Reed is taken, and it shows Archer is not ready to deal with things like hostage situations. One has to wonder how he will deal with death down the road. He doesn’t come across as incompetent, just inexperienced. He’s got a lot of learning to do on his feet, and I like the feel of it.

The guest stars are definitely strong points in the episode as well. The two lead guests are very well done and extremely well portrayed. They saved the episode from being completely devoid of any sort of development in characters whatsoever. Honestly, they carried most of the show.

Direction was also expertly handled, notably by none other than Star Trek alumni and Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton. He’s no stranger to directing, and it shows. Terra Nova is a well shot and acted episode, which helps to counter balance the negatives.

Speaking of the negatives, where do I even start?

Other characters outside of the one’s I’ve mentioned so far, do not exist this episode. We see a tiny bit of Reed, but he spends the bulk of the episode captive off screen. That means another episode of zero character development for him. We’re 5 episodes into this series and the most I know about security chief Malcolm Reed is that he’s still British.

The exact same can be said of Hoshi here. She was off to such a strong start, she was my favorite character for a bit. Now, she’s just a background member that sits this episode out. Mayweather gets a couple lines here too, but you’d think that since he was the one that wanted to go solve the mystery presented in the first place, he might actually be given things to do. I thought wrong, I guess.

As good as Enterprise has been this far, we have a problem with staying fixated on Archer, T’Pol, and Trip. Other characters don’t just get little time to shine — they get little time at all. One begins to wonder why they are even on the crew at all.

I wasn’t liking the last few scenes either. Archer and the elderly woman treated for cancer, Jasmin, spend the episode in a cycle of trust and distrust. Jasmin’s flip flopping between trusting Archer and distrusting him was kind of cliche. Pile on top of that that things end with a “you have saved one of our people, so you speak da true true” moment and we have some very lazy writing.

Terra Nova gets away with a better rating than it deserves today, but it’s only because of great performances out of guest stars Erick Avari and Mary Carver, and Scott Bakula.

Rating:

When rating an episode, it is broken down into four categories, each with a maximum of ten points:

Story: The quality of the writing, from plot to dialogue.
Character Development: How the characters change and grow.
Acting: Performances of series regulars as well as guest stars.
Production: Covering directing; set, prop, and costume design.

Given all of this, Terra Nova rates as follows:

Story: 5/10 - This episode is slow, boring, filled with cliches. The setup of the mystery is handled a lot better than the predictable answers to it.

Character Development: 6/10 - Archer is the only main character that gets any development, so it’s in the episode’s favor that it’s a ton of development and Bakula carries it so well. He single-handedly saved this episode from a very harsh 0/10 in this category.

Acting: 10/10 - Bakula, Avari, and Carver all crush their roles here. These three managed to pull off great performances from a very uninspiring script.

Production: 6/10 - The caves look like caves. The Novans look like they need a bath after playing with finger paint. Burton’s direction is visually solid, you can tell he’s done plenty of TV, and he got great work out of Bakula and the guests. But the pacing and editing are slow, the episode fails to catch much energy.

Episode Score: 6/10

Next time on Trek-a-Day: The crew visits an ancient Vulcan spiritual sanctuary, only to find it occupied by a paranoid race of aliens.