Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

The third and final episode of the latest three-episode arc of "Enterprise" ("Kir'Shara", or something like that) was pre-empted by local football games until Sunday afternoon, in my area, so I've only had time to watch it twice, so far. But here are my thoughts on the latest developments in that series, and how much I appreciate the old-timey "Trek-ness" of it all.

To begin with, during these latest three episodes, I've been thinking, "This is what it must have felt like to be watching the original series in first-run, with episodes like 'A Private Little War' and 'Errand of Mercy' and 'Let This Be Your Last Battlefield' commenting on the too-hot-to-handle-in-prime-time issues of the day, such as Vietnam and 'racial' prejudice." (I was only 9 years old when "Star Trek" was canceled, and I don't remember watching it and becoming an ardent fan until the early 1970's, in re-runs.) The Earth Embassy on Vulcan bombed soon after the opening credits of the first episode, resulting in considerable loss of human and Vulcan life; a Vulcan 'non-conformist' sect blamed for the terrorist act and rounded up in the interests of planetary security; carefully edited intelligence reports being used to justify a pre-emptive Vulcan attack on Andoria to destroy the Andorians' supposed Xindi-style WPD ("Weapons of Planetary Destruction"); and a whistle-blowing Ambassador Soval being given the bum's rush by his own government -- well, it doesn't take a genius to detect certain parallels to events here on Earth during the past five years or so.

Add in the "surprise" involvement of the Romulans behind the scenes, revealed in the last shot of the third episode, working towards the (familiar to "Next Generation" fans and Spock fans alike) goal of Vulcan-Romulan "re-unification", and you've got a tasty political stew with potential for interesting future developments in the current series.

Plus, Gary Graham as Soval just gets more and more attractive as a character, as he passionately withstands the trauma of emotional torture at the hands of the Andorian counterpart who actually cares about him as a person, in spite of everything. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Coombs played an alien suitor of Maj. Kira on "Deep Space Nine", as well as his recurring roles as the Vorta Weyoun and the Ferengi Brunt, but in his recurring role as the Andorian Commander Shrann on "Enterprise", he finally gets to play a complicated but basically good guy, and even help to save the day from time to time, and nothing brings out the "complicated" aspects of his character like having to deal with Soval. Yes, I'm loving it.

But the crowning glory -- the chocolate-covered cherry and hot fudge sauce on the rich chocolate ice cream (okay, so I have a small chocolate addiction!) -- as far as I'm concerned, was the theme of recovering the original manuscripts of Surak's writings, in order to settle once and for all (presumably) the different interpretations arising from textual variation among the existing, fragmented copies.

One of the first things I have to impress upon my Bible students each semester is that we don't have the original manuscripts of any of the materials included in the Bible -- all we have is, at best, copies of copies of copies of copies (etc.), many generations removed from any original autographs, with textual variations from one copy to another so numerous as to make your head spin. Even the most proto-Fundamentalist of Princeton Seminary professors in the 19th century only claimed that the Bible was literally inerrant in the original manuscripts, which no one alive has ever seen.

So, hearing T'Pol explain to Archer, in the first of these three episodes, that the absence of any reliable and complete copies of the Vulcan "scriptures" -- the writings of Surak -- had led to many competing Vulcan sects with their own, mutually conflicting, interpretations of how Surak really meant for his followers to behave and believe . . . well, that was like a taste of home-cooking!

I couldn't help but wonder how I and my fellow scholars and preachers would react if something similar to the Kir'Shara (the holographic receptacle/recording of Surak's complete writings, in his own hand) were to be dug up, and especially by an 'outsider' of some sort. Since there are no extant authoritative writings to suggest that Jesus himself ever wrote anything, I can't imagine a direct parallel from that quarter. But what if, somehow, in contradiction to everything I've been taught about Biblical criticism and questions of authorship, something that the most "enlightened" scholars regard as myth -- such as the long-disputed and dubious claim that Moses himself authored the original copies of the Torah, Genesis through Deuteronomy -- should suddenly be 'proven' to exist, as fact? I think I'd be freaking out at least as much as T'Pol was during these three episodes, and be equally resistant to accepting the notion as even within the realm of possibility. That's my visceral reaction.

Far more interesting and satisfying to contemplate, however, was how the Vulcan philosophy and culture that we came to know and obsess over on the original "Star Trek" might grow out of the events set in motion by Archer's temporary possession of Surak's katra. To borrow an over-used expression, it's "Fascinating."

And since of all the modern Trek incarnations, "DS9" is my clear undisputed favorite, I definitely enjoyed Archer's temporary foray into what I think of as "Benjamin Sisko territory," as the alien human who turns out to play a major prophetic role in the development of a far more ancient world's spiritual and political future.

Even more, I love the developing theme (so beautifully and eloquently expressed in "Babylon 5" during its five-year run) of humans as the technologically not-so-advanced but sociologically essential catalyst in building a community out of disparate alien species. I can still hear Delenn telling an interviewer that our great talent is that "humans build communities, wherever they go." And I heard echoes of that idea in Soval's words to the Star Fleet Admiral (who was soon to give his life in saving Soval's during the bombing), about how no other species the Vulcans had encountered had all those different and apparently conflicting qualities "in such confusing abundance" as humanity. Watching the woefully over-matched (in terms of hardware, at least) little Enterprise try to stand between the far superior fleets of Andorian and Vulcan ships, in order to prevent an interstellar war, I was thinking that, if the United Federation of Planets were going to come into existence any time within the next few decades, humanity's place in organizing the Federation would owe far more to the stubbornness and refusal to bow to the inevitable demonstrated by Tripp and Archer than to any intellectual or technological attainment.

Oh, and now T'Pol's a free woman, again, thanks to her unwanted husband turning out to be a really stand-up guy (as well as something of a hottie, in a stolid Vulcan way), after all. Much as I want to see what might develop between T'Pol and Tripp in terms of long-term commitment, I confess to sharing a little of T'Pol's apparent ambivalence at watching that very decent and considerate unconsummated husband walk out of her life.

I see we're in for re-runs of the Brent Spiner episode arc for the next few weeks (which were lots of fun and good Trek, also, but didn't grab me in quite the way that the Vulcan arc has done), but maybe in the New Year "Enterprise" will continue to impress and intrigue me.