Star Trek: Enterprise 3.10 FAQ
What’s tonight’s called?
“Similitude.”
Who’s responsible?
Teleplay is credited to “Odyssey 5” creator Manny Coto.
What does TV Guide say?
“To heal a critically-injured Trip, Dr. Phlox creates a clone of the engineer using an exotic creature in his lab but the clone's rapid growth and replication of Trip's behavior alarms the crew.”
Holy fetal-tissue research, Batman! They cannibalize a mini-Trip for parts?
They do, actually, but it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. The plan is to transplant "neural tissue" the clone won't miss.
What else is TV Guide not telling us?
There’s a dog-year element. Each clone day is the equivilent of about five normal human years. The faux Trip is expected to grow up, grow old and die over the course of two weeks.
The big news?
Mini-Tucker inherits more than the engineer’s physical characteristics. When the fast-sprouting clone assumes the look of a 8-year-old, he also gets Trip’s first eight years of memories. “There are some species that rely solely on genetic sequencing to pass on their cultural memories. Evidently, humans have a similar capacity,” notes the Phloxter. “This could be an important discovery!” Well, yeah! And a discovery, one assumes, never handed down to Bones, Bev, Bashir or any model EMH.
What’s good?
1) Nothing invests one in “Enterprise” as thoroughly as the ongoing intellectual and, yes, emotional journey undertaken by the complex and often unpredictable Vulcanian T’Pol – and she seems to take another key step on that trek this week. 2) Whoever cast the mini-Tuckers – Maximillian Orion Kesmodel, Adam Taylor Gordon and Shane Sweet - did an startlingly good job. 3) This is the third “Enterprise” I’ve enjoyed in as many weeks, following “Twilight” (where Archer’s memory problem almost wiped out mankind) and “North Star” (last week’s intriguing cowboys-and-aliens extravaganza). Happily, the series seems to be moving away from patience-testing MACO phaser-fights to emphasize solidly paced, thought-provoking science fiction.
What’s not so good?
The credulity-straining circumstances engineered to generate the episode’s beguiling moral dilemmas. We’re to believe the sum of a human being’s memories are contained in every one of his skin or blood cells? Also, the miraculous “mimetic simbiots” are “a closely guarded secret,” but Phlox has had one on a shelf behind the tongue depressors for the last two years? Also also, wouldn’t you think Archer would be a little nicer to the clone - since pretend-Trip inherits all the original’s personality and memories?
How does it end, spoiler-boy?
As it began: “We will go forward with renewed determination to complete this mission, so that his sacrifice won't just have been for the people on this ship, but for all the citizens of Earth.
Herc’s rating for “Enterprise” 3.10?
***1/2
The Hercules T. Strong Rating System:
9 p.m. Wednesday. UPN.
