Tell me this: why does this show exist? / Wrote a list but it’s just
a blank sheet / Can you tell me why’d they make, why did they make “Carpenter Street”?
This is a review of the
Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Carpenter Street.” If you have not seen this episode,
and you don’t want to know what happens in it, be warned: spoilers beyond this point!
So, this episode is from Enterprise’s third season, when they retooled the show to focus
on a 9/11-inspired season-long storyline about the ship entering a mysterious region of space
and embarking on a desperate search for aliens rumored to be building a weapon
capable of wiping out all of humanity. And this episode . . . is kinda related to that? I guess?
Detroit, Michigan, 2004: This guy, Loomis, comes home after what seems like a long day. Guzzles
some generic beer while walking around his apartment never taking the can from his lips,
eats his last piece of bathroom pizza, and answers a phone call from a mysterious man
who wants to know if Loomis has made his selection yet. We see the mysterious man on
the other end of the call hang up the phone, and he’s a Xindi-Reptilian! Gasp, et cetera.
We follow Loomis for a short while longer after the opening credits. He picks up a sex worker,
who recognizes him, and he then repeats her name and blood type — he works at a blood bank and she
was there earlier. Anyway, she gets in the car and politely waits while he takes a chloroformed
rag out of a jar and knocks her out with it, and he delivers her to an abandoned building where
there are several other unconscious people laid out on beds in some sort of makeshift
clinic. There’s a briefcase with some cash in it waiting for Loomis, and he takes it and goes.
Meanwhile, across the galaxy a hundred fifty years later, Captain Archer is making himself
a midnight snack when temporal agent Daniels shows up like “Hey, we detected some Xindi-Reptilians on
Earth in the year 2004 and I want you to go back and figure out what they’re doing and get ‘em to
knock it off.” Archer’s like, “Okay,” and wakes up T’Pol to fill her in on the situation. And,
T’Pol asks the extremely logical question, “Why does Daniels need us to do this when
he’s the temporal agent and preventing time travel shenanigans is literally his job?” To
which Archer offers the extremely logical answer, “Because we’re the main characters in the show.”
Archer and T’Pol change into 21st century clothes and, thanks to the magic of editing they are
able to step from an Enterprise corridor straight onto a Detroit street in 2004.
Daniels has equipped Archer with a set of temporal tags,
which will allow any people or equipment from the future to be automatically retrieved from
the 21st century when their mission is over. For a brief, beautiful moment I thought we were
about to get a Star-Trek-ified variation on one of my favorite cheesy 1990s sci-fi shows,
Time Traxx, with Archer and T’Pol shooting temporal tags at time traveling bad guys and
sending them back to their own century Darien Lambert style. But alas, it was not to be.
Archer and T’Pol steal a truck, rob an ATM using a tricorder — good trick to know,
I’ll try that next time I happen to have my tricorder with me at the bank — and begin to
search for the Xindi. They locate the Xindi’s base of operations — that abandoned factory on
Carpenter Street — arriving in time to see Loomis delivering another abductee. They follow Loomis
back to his place and, after a brief chase, tie him to a chair and conduct an interrogation.
Since they broke into his home without a warrant, restrained him, physically assaulted him,
and refused to let him contact a lawyer, Loomis naturally assumes Archer and T’Pol are cops. He
tells them he’s been working for the Xindi — he doesn’t know they’re aliens, he’s never actually
seen them — and assumes they’re developing some kind of vaccine or something. When T’Pol
points out that legitimate medical research doesn’t usually involve abducting people,
or take place in an abandoned factory, Loomis is like, “Well, maybe they’re terrorists, I dunno.
Anyway, they hired me because I work at a blood bank and they need someone with each blood type,
and they’re paying me five thousand dollars per person, so now that I’ve helped you can I go?”
Archer comes up with a plan: he will pretend to be Loomis’s newest abductee in order to get
inside the Xindi facility. On the way there, Loomis is hungry, so they stop at a drive-thru
so he can get a burger. Archer gets one, too, but I guess he’s saving his for later because
Loomis is the only one we see eating. Vegan T’Pol abstains. They get to the Xindi factory,
Loomis dumps Archer on a bed, Archer pretends to be unconscious while some Xindi come in and
take a blood sample, then once they’re gone he gets up and starts snooping around. He
discovers that the Xindi are working on some kind of biological weapon, a virus that they
are apparently modifying to attack humans based on blood type — that’s why they needed one of each!
Archer shoots, the Xindi shoot back, one of the Xindi grabs the virus and makes a run
for it and Archer gives chase. In the car, Loomis surprises T’Pol with a switchblade,
but she stuns him with a phaser blast and gets out to help Archer. Eventually,
there’s only one Xindi left, and he’s got the virus, and he’s up on a roof near a big fan,
and the idea is he’s gonna throw the virus into the fan and it’ll get blown all over the city,
and since it’s already been coded to affect six of the eight human blood types,
it’ll cause some pretty catastrophic damage to 21st century humanity.
But that doesn’t happen, because Archer shoots him and then grabs the cylinder containing the
virus before it can roll into the fan. Archer, T’Pol, the stunned Xindis and all their equipment,
return to Enterprise, while back in 2004 Loomis gets arrested by the real police,
all of whom then immediately drive away from the crime scene where they just discovered
evidence of an illegal medical experiment involving six missing people. The end!
How is it that the producers of a Star Trek series — even a fairly mediocre one like
Enterprise — can create a completely imaginary future world full of spaceships and aliens,
and it’s fully immersive and I never question it for a second while I’m watching the show,
but then they do an episode like this that takes place on planet Earth in the
same era in which the show was actually being produced, and I don’t believe it for a second?
From the first time I ever watched this episode, back when it was originally broadcast,
I’ve found it to have an uncanny quality that is difficult to articulate. Its 2004-set scenes,
which account for the overwhelming majority of the episode, feel inauthentic. And I still struggle to
put my finger on why that is. There are so many details that just feel wrong. In the first scene,
Loomis walks into his apartment, goes straight to the fridge, grabs a beer, takes three or four
big gulps from the can as he crosses the room, goes straight into the bathroom, where there’s
a pizza box on the sink with one perfect slice of pizza in it — it just doesn’t feel right.
And of course, I know intellectually that I’m watching an actor on a TV show. But in the moment,
watching the episode, it doesn’t feel like I’m watching a real person living a real life.
That sense of inauthenticity recurs throughout the show. At the drive-thru,
when Loomis orders a combo, and Archer orders a burger for himself, with nothing to drink,
and then we don’t see him eat it. The ending, with Loomis being arrested by cops who all
immediately leave the crime screen in a hurry like they’re trying to get to McDonald’s before
they stop serving breakfast. I’m sorry that I can’t describe it any better than I am,
but I don’t know how else to say it other than I just don’t buy it.
It’s not the fault of the actors — they all do fine. Leland Orser, who plays Loomis,
is a good, dependable character actor — he guest shots on episodes of other Star Trek shows,
he was on NYPD Blue, he was on Law & Order, he had a recurring role on ER,
he was in Seven, he was in the Taken movies — there’s nothing wrong with
him or his performance in the episode. But, he’s playing a character who doesn’t seem real to me.
Of course, it doesn’t help that Loomis doesn’t do anything interesting and the episode gives
me no reason to care about him in any way. I don’t sympathize with him, I don’t despise him,
I’m not hoping for him to get either a redemption or a comeuppance — he’s just there, doing stuff.
That’s a problem with the episode overall. Not only does it feel inauthentic, it also
feels pointless. What’s this episode about? Archer and T’Pol go back in time to prevent
the Xindi from unleashing a bio-weapon on 21st century Earth, they find the Xindi right away,
they come up with a plan to stop the Xindi, they carry out the plan more or less without a hitch,
they stop the Xindi and go home. Aside from one line from T’Pol about our civilization’s
irrational attachment to fossil fuels, and her obvious disdain for Loomis’s
diet and smoking habit, the episode has nothing to say about contemporary society.
Loomis, a man apparently living in poverty compelled to abduct people and essentially
sell them to anonymous strangers conducting an illegal medical experiment, would seem to
present an opportunity for some social commentary, but the episode doesn’t seem interested in that.
It moves along pretty quickly, which I appreciate. But, what’s the point of
writing a story that moves but never goes anywhere? The justification for Archer and
T’Pol’s time travel is laughably thin — Daniels, the trained temporal agent, going back to stop
the Xindi himself would require cutting through too much red tape, but it’s apparently fine for
him to draft two other people and send them back in time on a mission to save the future instead?
More importantly, once the heroes arrive in 2004, they don’t encounter any serious obstacles. They
don’t have to deal with any reversals — the closest they come is when Loomis tries to
knife T’Pol in the car, and she handles that in a few seconds and winds up without a scratch on
her. Archer defeats the Xindi and prevents the release of the bio-weapon by catching
up to the guy and shooting him and grabbing the canister. There’s no twist, no clever resolution,
no bit where the good guys have to out-think the bad guys. There’s not even anything that comes
back later on, that impacts subsequent events in the series. Stuff happens, characters do things,
then it’s over. It’s a time travel story that has almost nothing to do with the temporal cold war,
it’s a Xindi story that has almost nothing to do with the larger Xindi story arc,
and it has nothing of interest to offer in its own right. Why are we here?
Were they an episode short this season and figured, what the hell,
let’s do one set on present day Earth so we can save on sets and special effects?
It doesn’t make the show any better, but at least it’s an explanation for why this episode exists.
I’m not even saying this is an all-time worst episode or anything. It’s watchable. It’s fine.
It’s not distinguished in any way — it’s artless, it’s perfunctory. But it’s nothing
anyone involved should be embarrassed about. And hey, if you enjoy spending an hour watching
characters just kinda doing things, and only having to overcome extremely minor challenges
on the way to achieving a goal that never feels like anything other than a foregone conclusion,
in a depiction of contemporary America that feels faker than the 22nd century spaceship,
this episode has exactly what you’re looking for!
Those are my thoughts on “Carpenter Street.” What do you think of this episode? Please share your
thoughts with me in the comments. If you’d like to support this channel — and I sure wish you would,
if you can afford it — you can do so by becoming a patron at patreon.com/steveshives,
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Don’t forget to join me and my best friend Jason Harding this weekend for our review of episode six
of season two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Our review will be up sometime on Saturday. And,
please come back next week for another retro review. I’m beginning a new batch of episodes,
with a new theme, and that theme is: labor! Workers’ rights! Star Trek has had a lot
to say about that subject over the years, and it seemed like a very timely subject,
given the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes — especially after my viewer E.R. Mixon suggested it
in a comment on last week’s review! Thanks, E.R. Mixon! The batch of retro reviews focusing on Star
Trek’s labor-themed episodes begins with a look at an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series: “The
Cloud Minders.” I’ll see you next week for that. Thanks for watching and take care, everybody!