Archer, Moral Responsiblity and all that

[JiNX-01]

Well, in Archer's defense, they did the same thing with Janeway, where any decision she made was the "right" one, even when it was blatantly wrong. *shrug* That was another one of the reasons I approached DivPath the way I did - I wanted to approach Archer as someone to whom things didn't work out for him for a change and play with how that changed him.

I suspect the reason they didn't do what I suggested for "The Communicator" is out of their general desire to avoid really rocking the boat when it comes to the show. Not to mention, how does Archer keep his command if the planet does self-destruct after their intervention? How does T'Pol stay aboard ENT? For that matter, coming so soon after the Paragaan disaster, how does Starfleet even argue for keeping ENT operational? If they actually pulled the trigger on something like this, it would have to be dealt with very carefully lest it come across as kind of silly.

ETA: Whoops. Me & Aquarius were responding at the same time. I was mostly responding to JiNX.

Yeah, total destruction wasn't necessary. I would have preferred to have Archer swing by later say in Season 4 (perhaps after a visit to Earth) to find out the impact of their actions.
Archer cleaned up after himself before leaving, but suppose he didn't know that the military researchers had records of their examination of the weapons and the communicator, not to mention biological samples from the "supersoldiers." They'd have advanced weapons, sophisticated communication, and perhaps even bioweapons which would give them an enormous advantage over their enemies.

[entkayjay]

As for "The Communicator," it just doesn't make any sense to me.
It's not like Archer and Reed were trying to retrieve a phaser. It was a communicator. The Natives didn't even know what it was until T'Pol tried to contact Archer. And the plan to fly an invisible spaceship to rescue Archer and Reed is hardly the way to avoid contaminating a population's development. It's not like they landed 10 miles out of town. They came down right in the middle of the military base. T'Pol was the sole proponent of non-interference at any cost and she blew it off to save Archer and Reed.

Well, to bring it to present day Earth... we have an awful lot of people who claim to have been contacted by aliens, or have seen ships, or the whole Area 51 thing with the government knowing things about visitors from other planets for over fifty years now, and being in possession of advanced technology from a ship, etc. Most of those people are... well, they aren't treated as mainstream, to keep it polite. (For the record, I've seen something I can't explain, and we've had interactions with Black Helicopters, and I also believe that every "conspiracy theory" has some wee grain of truth in it somewhere, so I'm, um, not exactly mainstream either, lol!)

I'd suppose that the same thing would more than likely replicate itself on other planets. "Agh, it's the crackpots again. Oy! (Quick, hide the, uh, 'weather balloon'... yes, that's it!)"

The Prime Directive is all well and good, but one bit of contamination could either end up being nothing or cascading out of control, the point is no one really knows. And if aliens showed up to rescue their colleagues from Area 51 in an invisible spaceship without parking 10 miles out of town... who's to say?

All in all, it's a TV show, and the writers suck sometimes. But we love the crack anyway!

[entkayjay]

I also agree with the idea of Archer needing an occasional smackdown--but I have the feeling that if it was anything *TOO* bad, it would kind of be the end of the show. If he was responsible for the destruction of an entire planet, do we think they'd really let him stay out there to mess up more stuff? It would have to be something he'd have to spend the rest of his life feeling crappy about, but nothing that Starfleet would dishonorably discharge him (or worse).

That pretty much happened in "Shockwave I," albeit unknowingly not by his or his crew's hand, and Starfleet recalled them immediately. Had setting a planet's atmosphere on fire and killing many, many people truly been the fault of Archer or the Enterprise in general, there would have been no more exploration for a very long time. It's been a while since I've seen the ep, but I seem to recall someone (maybe Archer, even), saying that maybe the Vulcans were right, maybe humans weren't ready to be out there.

When Archer crossed his own personal ethical line and marooned another ship in space in order to complete his mission in Season 3, that was an emotional smackdown of epic proportions to him, one that haunted him well into "Home" and shaped him during Season 4. So, we got the correction to his naivete throughout the whole Xindi arc and it could have been marvelous to see where it took him.

Change to a character can't be appreciated until there has been time to actually watch the growth. There has to be a foundation, which is expressed over time, a catalyst (sometimes quick but usually longer term) for the change that occurs, and then a revelation of that change again over time, in order for the character growth to be believable. Alas, I feel that far too many people who dismissed Enterprise out of hand within a few episodes never really gave it a chance to show that journey from "Broken Bow" through what would have been the last episode of the seventh year of the show. It always seemed to me that they wanted a perfect Trek, not a story of how we got on the road to TOS.

[Honeybee]

Also, Archer got a serious smackdown in Home. It's pretty clear that a committee was convened to investigate the events of the Expanse, and many people were not happy, despite Archer & Co having saved the whole friggin galaxy.

[Kathy Rose]

Also, Archer got a serious smackdown in Home. It's pretty clear that a committee was convened to investigate the events of the Expanse, and many people were not happy, despite Archer & Co having saved the whole friggin galaxy.

Yeah. That always puzzled me. Archer and his crew had just saved Earth, and "they" wanted to blame Earth's association with aliens as the cause of the problem in the first place, and by extension, anyone who associated with said aliens, such as Starfleet? Makes me wonder how much the public actually knew about what was going on at the time. Was it even public knowledge that the extradimensional beings were going to remake the universe to suit them? Or was that kept quiet to prevent panic, even after the fact?

[Honeybee]

It's really interesting. Clearly, Terra Prime had a completely wrong impression of how things went down. I would be interested to know how much of went on was really reported and reported well - and how many people on Earth suspected the official story was not the whole story (and since we don't know what the official story was, we can't really know if they are wrong or right).

It seems that Archer was viewed as a hero, enough to get elementary schools named after him and to have a complex about it, but the mission also seems to have pissed off a whole lot of people as well. And say what you want, Archer never seemed to view his actions in the Expanse as heroic - but rather ugly but necessary.

[ladyrainbow]

I don't think the fact that Trellium-D affected Vulcans was made common knowledge, wasn't it? That was why Vulcan didn't send any ships into the Expanse after what happened to the Seleya.

If it wasn't, I could see the press on Earth spin it as "the Vulcans didn't help us" and no one else (Andorians, Tellarites, etc.) sent anyone else to help Enterprise...and Columbia was stuck in Spacedock. I could see how that would piss a lot of people off and give the wrong impression.

That would definitely give a group like Terra Prime fodder for their propaganda.

There's a saying, "No one is a hero on their hearthstone." Unfortunately for Archer, that's very true, even if the man commanded the ship that saved the whole friggin' galaxy.