Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuted recently, and I gotta say,
so far, so good. It’s off to the best start of any of the currently in-production Star Trek shows.
Its second episode, “Children of the Comet,” struck a good balance between action/adventure and
character beats. And, it reminded me of something: one of my favorite episodes
of Star Trek: Enterprise also features the crew investigating a comet.
That episode is “Breaking the Ice” from Enterprise’s first season — the one where Reed
and Mayweather do an EVA on the surface of the comet, but then Travis hurts his leg and they
have to hurry back to the shuttlepod because it’s almost sunrise on the comet and the high
temperature will cook them if they don’t get outta there, and there’s a Vulcan ship nearby that can
assist in rescuing the shuttlepod but Archer has to swallow his pride and ask them for help,
which is a big deal for him because he’s Mr. Humans-Can-Do-Space-Things-On-Their-Own,
and also there’s that scene where the bridge crew answers questions for school children
back on Earth just like an actual crew of astronauts would, so there’s, relatively speaking,
a ton of astronaut shit in the show, and in general it’s the sort of episode that makes me go,
“Damn, I wish the series was like this more often!”
After I alluded to “Breaking the Ice” in my review of that Strange New Worlds episode, folks in the
comments started mentioning episodes of other Star Trek shows that have featured comets, and it got
me to thinking: are all the comet episodes good? Could that be a thing — like “the odd-numbered
Trek movies suck,” only true? Only one way to find out — let’s look at some other comet episodes!
For me, the most obvious one beyond “Children of the Comet” and “Breaking the Ice” is “Death Wish,”
from the second season of Star Trek: Voyager. The ship encounters
a comet with some unusual properties, so Captain Janeway orders Lieutenant Torres to beam a piece
aboard for analysis. But when she energizes the transporter, this dude materializes.
He introduces himself as Q. Not long after that, the Q we all know and love shows up,
too — it turns out this Q, who eventually names himself Quinn, has been imprisoned
inside that comet by the other members of the Q Continuum to prevent him from committing suicide.
Quinn argues that he should be allowed to end his own life if that’s what he wants to do, but
Q, representing the consensus opinion of the Continuum, argues that Quinn’s suicide
could set a dangerous precedent for Q society, since no Q has ever killed themselves before.
Quinn requests asylum aboard Voyager, and that leads to one of the most
well worn tropes in all of Star Trek: the courtroom episode! It doesn’t matter how
many thousands of light-years the ship is from Earth, or how many godlike beings are aboard,
eventually this problem is gonna be resolved by people sitting at a table, talking. Star Trek!
It’s a fun, thought-provoking episode that deals with a relevant social topic — assisted
suicide — with great performances by John de Lancie and Gerrit Graham, and even a Riker cameo!
All in all, one of the best shows Voyager ever produced. And when its first airing was over,
all of us who watched it felt satisfied, but also a little sad, and we couldn’t figure out why. Now,
twenty-six years later, we realize why: because we’d just watched the last great Q episode.
. . . All right, “Q2” isn’t bad, but it ain’t this good!
More of a Q episode than a comet episode, but the comet figures in. There’s even a scene where,
during the asylum hearing, Quinn transports everyone inside the comet to show them what the
conditions of his confinement were like. I still think the comet might be the key ingredient here.
Deep Space Nine has a comet episode: season three’s “Destiny,” where a passing comet
complicates efforts by Sisko’s crew to set up a communications relay through the wormhole
to the Gamma Quadrant. The comet winds up on a collision course with the wormhole,
and that’s a problem because its chemical composition could potentially
collapse the wormhole permanently. So, Sisko and Kira have to wrap the shields of a shuttlepod
around the comet — which has been blown into three large fragments by a failed attempt to destroy
it — and fly it through the wormhole to the other side. Everything turns out fine — a little bit of
comet leaks through the shuttlepod’s shields, but only enough to wedge the wormhole open a crack,
which enables their communications relay to work! Yay! Thanks, comet!
I wouldn’t call “Destiny” one of the best DS9 episodes, but it’s still quite good.
It deals with Sisko’s ambivalence over being the Emissary to the Prophets, which is an important
part of his character arc throughout the series. It explores Sisko’s relationship with Kira.
It deals with themes of religion and science and
which one should take precedence over the other. And there’s a Cardassian scientist played by
Tracy Scoggins who wants to ride O’Brien’s face like a goddamn hopper ball — what’s not to like?
And hey, let’s not forget that there’s at least one comet in every Deep Space Nine episode — the
one that flies past camera at the beginning of the opening titles. There’s a comet in every episode,
and Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek show — coincidence? I say again: thanks, comet!
You know what else? There’s a comet in “Balance of Terror” from the first season of Star Trek:
The Original Series — one of the best episodes in the whole franchise, an absolute classic.
The comet isn’t a huge part of that episode, but it is important to the plot, serving a crucial
role in the cat-and-mouse game played by the Enterprise and the Romulan ship. But, like I said,
“Balance of Terror” is one of the best episodes of any Star Trek series, ever, so it doesn’t really
need much help from the comet — a comet cameo was all that was necessary to put it over the top.
What other comet episodes am I forgetting? I feel like there’s one more notable one . . . I
can’t think of it, but I know there’s a comet in it, so it must be a really good — oh, fuck.
“Masks,” from TNG’s seventh season. Yeah. There is a comet in that one, isn’t there. Look,
it’s even in the shot they use for the title plate. The Enterprise investigates this comet.
After a sensor scan, the ship’s computer starts acting funny, displaying strange symbols. Data
begins exhibiting strange behavior. Objects nobody has seen before start appearing all over the ship.
They use the Enterprise’s phasers to melt away the outer layers of the comet,
and it turns out an alien data archive is concealed within. The archive takes control
of the ship, slowly transforming it into a city from the civilization that created it. It also
takes control of Data, manifesting multiple personalities from its mythology through him,
giving Brent Spiner the opportunity to show us how many funny voices he knows! It’s not very many!
Ultimately, Captain Picard puts on a mask to portray the counterpart of the most powerful
persona inhabiting Data, and they act out a scenario from this alien mythology that,
once complete, releases the Enterprise from the archive’s
control. It’s basically a crappy holodeck episode that doesn’t use the holodeck.
So, okay, “Masks” ain’t so great, but that’s five good-to-great comet episodes compared to one
lousy comet episode. Five out of six — that’s eighty-three percent — that’s an
.830 batting average! A comet doesn’t guarantee a good episode of Star Trek,
but it definitely seems to improve the odds.
Maybe the producers in charge of Star Trek should take this
to the next logical level and make a show about the crew of a starship that does nothing but
check out comets. Star Trek: Comet Squad! Every week, a different comet-related episode:
the crew has to stop a comet from smashing into a planet,
the crew discovers a comet that turns out to not be a comet, the crew is trapped between
two comets on a collision course when its engines fail — the possibilities are endless!
And, they could really lean into the comet theme, too: the ship is called the U.S.S.
Edmond Halley; the captain is a grizzled Starfleet veteran who gets the assignment
as a last chance from a friendly admiral, and it turns out he’s secretly hoping to use the
ship’s comet-centric mission to locate and destroy the comet that killed his wife twenty years ago.
Eventually, he tracks the wife-killing comet down, but when he finds it, it turns out the comet
has reformed and started a family. The comet’s like, “I was only a kid when I killed your wife.
I was so young, I barely had a tail” — I know comets only develop tails when they get close
enough to a star for some of their material to vaporize, who cares, nerd, that’s not the point!
Anyway, the comet’s like, “I know I can never make up for what I took from you. All I can say
is that I’m truly sorry. And all I can ask of you is that you judge me not by
how angry and reckless I was back then, but as the comet I am today — a husband and a father.”
And the captain bites his lip. And orders tactical to stand down on phasers and torpedoes.
Choking back tears, he tells the comet to get the hell outta here. And from that point on,
the captain’s anti-comet attitude starts to change, until eventually, in the series finale,
he marries his new husband — he’s pansexual — and that new husband
is the comet from the opening credits of Deep Space Nine — which is the only
crossover to another Star Trek show in the entire series, because they do too much of that shit!