ent s2e22 cogenitor

i put off watching this episode for several days. i went back and forth on whether to skip it. maybe i should have, because i was pissed off by the end.

this *could* have said something. how about technical progress not indicating superiority or moral standing? the captain sent a sex slave back to their captors and we’re going to blame the one person who gave enough of a damn to help them for their suicide? we’re going to chew out TRIP for this??? are you fucking serious? and to add insult to injury, archer pulls out the “unborn baby” card. because of course, the cogenitor’s only value is being able to carry children. forget the awful mistreatment faced by this fully intelligent and capable being, the real tragedy is the fucking fetus.

enterprise is not an intelligent show. it’s at its worst when trying to approach serious moral quandaries. before, this has resulted in takes such as “internment camps bad” and “discrimination for genetics bad”. incredibly lukewarm, but overall inoffensive. this is an entirely separate level. i have no idea what point was trying to be made.

the execution is fine, up until the last six minutes. archer was out of character, he has been shown to stand up for vulnerable people before. i think trip was right when he said fighting for the cogenitor’s rights was something archer would do. not only did he deny asylum, he tried to push further technological and cultural exchange with the aliens that, again, KEEP SEX SLAVES. maybe if archer’s infatuation with these people was interrogated, maybe if his prioritization of making any first contact over whether doing so would be ethical was questioned, maybe we could have learned something about him. again, could have said something, but didn’t.

i can’t say this episode disappointed me, because i’d only heard bad things and knew i wasn’t gonna come out of it happy. i kind of hoped it wasn’t going to be as bad as i expected but, well. it was.