The Quantum Mirror Archives — Recovered Television Review
November 28, 2004 | Television and Science Fiction
There is a wonderful scene about halfway through Star Trek: The Near Frontier in which an elderly Vulcan science instructor is attempting to explain interstellar commercial law to a room full of human engineers.
He has spent nearly two hours describing the obligations of a civilization operating vessels beyond its own planetary system.
A young engineer raises his hand.
"Suppose somebody comes into our Solar System with something we want to buy?"
The Vulcan explains that trade must be conducted through recognized planetary authorities, subject to mutually accepted diplomatic and commercial protocols.
The engineer nods.
"Well, there's a ship from Andoria selling gravity generators at the Mars transfer station. They're offering forty percent off if we buy six."
The Vulcan closes his eyes.
The camera remains on him for several seconds.
Then he asks, very quietly, whether the engineer has already purchased them.
"Only four."
It is the funniest scene in the picture.
It may also be the one that best explains what this unusual new Star Trek production is trying to accomplish.
Humanity is entering an unfamiliar interstellar community.
Its technology is improving faster than its understanding of the civilizations around it.
The Vulcans are trying to help.
And the humans are already making deals behind their backs.
An unexpected return
The movie begins, however, with a character audiences have not seen in decades.
Gary Seven.
In the familiar 1968 Star Trek episode Assignment: Earth, the mysterious operative was charged with preventing humanity from destroying itself. His companion, Roberta Lincoln, became an unlikely participant in his extraordinary mission.
The new film returns to their story in a brief, beautifully realized opening sequence set in 1996.
Gary Seven is older than when we last saw him, although he remains frustratingly unwilling to explain exactly how old he is.
Roberta, now an experienced operative in her own right, is monitoring a series of disappearances involving scientists, military specialists and influential political figures.
They have uncovered evidence of a clandestine operation involving genetically engineered humans.
Its principal figure is Khan Noonien Singh.
And someone is arranging for him to escape Earth.
The escape of Khan Noonien Singh
The filmmakers have made a fascinating choice.
Rather than restaging the Eugenics Wars on an enormous scale, they show us a handful of events surrounding the departure of the SS Botany Bay.
Khan's followers have been defeated.
Their political and military organization is collapsing.
But several governments are still attempting to recover information about the genetic engineering methods that created them.
There are also people who fear that Khan's capture would provoke renewed conflict among the nations competing to control that research.
And a small number who believe that Khan and his followers should be destroyed rather than imprisoned.
Gary Seven discovers a secret operation to remove the surviving Augments from Earth aboard an experimental sleeper vessel.
The operation is not being conducted by Khan alone.
Someone with access to considerable financial resources, advanced engineering and classified launch facilities is assisting him.
Roberta initially assumes this is another attempt by the Augments to escape justice.
Gary is less certain.
He discovers that the vessel's navigation systems contain information that could not have originated from any known Earth technology.
There is evidence of outside assistance.
But from whom?
A visitor who arrives too late
At the launch facility, Gary encounters a stranger identifying himself only as Daniels.
The name will be familiar to viewers of Enterprise.
Daniels is the mysterious operative who has repeatedly intervened in Captain Archer's life during the Temporal Cold War.
Here he appears considerably younger, though his manner is already that of a man who has experienced far too many inconvenient historical complications.
Gary immediately recognizes that Daniels is not an ordinary human.
Their conversation is brief, guarded and surprisingly amusing.
Daniels insists that the Botany Bay must depart.
Gary asks why an intelligence operative would assist the escape of a dangerous tyrant.
Daniels answers that preventing the launch could be worse.
Gary refuses to accept that explanation.
He suspects Daniels knows what will eventually happen to Khan.
Daniels admits that he does.
But he also explains that several competing interests are attempting to alter the vessel's departure, not necessarily to save or destroy Khan, but to change events that follow it.
The escape is already part of history.
What matters is who has discovered it and what they intend to do.
Gary Seven reaches an uncomfortable decision.
He permits the launch, but ensures that the vessel's location cannot easily be traced from Earth.
Roberta is furious.
She asks whether they have just allowed one of the most dangerous men in human history to escape.
Gary answers that they have.
Then, after a moment, he adds that allowing a dangerous man to leave is not the same thing as forgiving him.
The Botany Bay disappears into the darkness.
Daniels departs as mysteriously as he arrived.
And Gary Seven places a small data cylinder in a secure archive.
Its label reads:
FOR THOSE WHO FOLLOW.
The screen fades.
The date changes.
EARTH — 2094.
A century later
The transition is extraordinary.
The camera moves past a rotating industrial station orbiting the Moon, where enormous electromagnetic launch systems are delivering cargo toward Mars.
Beyond it, construction vessels are assembling a passenger transport whose design is unmistakably related to the ships that will eventually become Starfleet vessels.
The music rises.
For a moment, the familiar Star Trek theme appears to be approaching.
Then it changes into something more hesitant, playful and exploratory.
This is not the Earth of Captain Kirk.
Nor is it the Earth of Jonathan Archer.
It is a civilization learning to live and work beyond its home planet.
Humanity has achieved practical interplanetary travel. Permanent settlements exist on the Moon and Mars. Asteroid mining has become a significant industry.
Warp technology is advancing, although most vessels remain limited to relatively modest speeds.
At Warp 1, a journey to Alpha Centauri still takes years.
Humanity is learning that faster-than-light travel does not automatically make the universe small.
It simply makes previously impossible journeys conceivable.
And that is enough to inspire a new generation of explorers.
The ship that almost wasn't
Our principal setting is the UNS Wayfarer, a recently completed exploratory vessel operated by a coalition of Earth scientific institutions and commercial organizations.
It is not a Starfleet warship.
Indeed, Starfleet itself remains a developing organization whose responsibilities have not yet assumed the familiar form audiences will recognize.
The Wayfarer has a small crew, limited armament and an experimental warp drive that its engineers regard with a mixture of admiration and personal suspicion.
Its commander is Captain Mara Ellison, a former orbital rescue pilot whose principal qualification appears to be an extraordinary ability to keep her composure when expensive machinery stops working.
Her chief engineer, Tomas Vale, is a brilliant and permanently exasperated technician who maintains that the ship was designed by people who have never had to repair anything while wearing a pressure suit.
Their navigator, Lieutenant Amara Okonkwo, is one of the first humans trained extensively in Vulcan stellar navigation techniques.
She respects Vulcan science but is beginning to suspect that her instructors have omitted several important chapters.
The ship also carries Dr. Sorel, an elderly Vulcan scientific adviser who has agreed, with considerable reservations, to accompany the expedition.
Sorel is not a secret manipulator.
He genuinely wants humanity to succeed.
Unfortunately, he is accustomed to deciding what information humans are ready to receive.
This habit rapidly becomes a source of conflict.
The neighborhood
The Wayfarer's first mission is modest.
It will survey the outer Solar System, investigate unusual gravitational measurements beyond Neptune, and examine several possible locations for automated navigation beacons.
A secondary assignment concerns a cluster of unidentified objects moving through the region beyond the known planets.
The crew initially suspects that these may be fragments of an ancient comet.
Their instruments suggest otherwise.
The objects are following controlled trajectories.
Someone has been moving equipment through the outer Solar System.
And judging by the accumulated records, they have been doing so for decades.
The discovery is immensely exciting.
It also causes a diplomatic emergency.
Sorel contacts the Vulcan authorities, who instruct the Wayfarer to discontinue its investigation until a properly equipped survey vessel can arrive.
Captain Ellison asks why.
Sorel explains that certain objects in the outer Solar System may belong to visiting commercial traffic.
Ellison is astonished.
"Visiting from where?"
Sorel hesitates.
"Elsewhere."
It is an answer unlikely to satisfy a ship full of human explorers.
The market at the edge of the Sun
The unidentified objects lead the crew toward an enormous, sparsely occupied trading installation operating far beyond Neptune.
Its operators call it the Lantern.
It is not a formal space station.
It is a collection of modular docking structures, fuel depots, cargo platforms and pressurized habitats assembled over generations by traders from several nearby systems.
The Lantern is recognized by a number of alien commercial organizations.
Earth has never heard of it.
The Vulcans have.
The scene in which the Wayfarer approaches the installation is one of the movie's great visual achievements.
Ships of radically different designs are docked around its irregular framework.
Some use technologies humans can barely identify.
Others look almost disappointingly ordinary.
There are cargo haulers, repair vessels, private transports and several small craft that appear to have been modified so frequently that their original manufacturers would probably refuse to recognize them.
The station's docking supervisor informs Captain Ellison that Earth vessels are welcome, provided they can pay the fees.
Ellison asks whether Earth has an account.
The supervisor checks.
It does not.
Then he asks whether she is interested in opening one.
Beware Vulcans bearing gifts
At the Lantern, the crew meets an Andorian trader named Thalek sh'Renn.
Thalek is charming, flamboyant, frequently irritating and apparently capable of turning almost any conversation into a commercial negotiation.
He is also one of the few people willing to answer the humans' questions directly.
He explains that the Vulcans have maintained relationships with the surrounding civilizations for centuries.
Earth, by comparison, is a newly emerging market.
Its engineers are capable.
Its industrial resources are impressive.
Its political institutions are still unfamiliar with the hazards of interstellar commerce.
And its principal diplomatic advisers are Vulcan.
Thalek finds the arrangement highly convenient.
For the Vulcans.
He invites the humans to examine a compact artificial-gravity generator available at what he describes as a remarkably favorable introductory price.
The device could transform life aboard Earth spacecraft.
It could also make lunar and Martian habitats considerably easier to design, reducing the need for rotating sections or continuously accelerated transports.
Sorel immediately objects.
The technology, he explains, requires specialized maintenance, regulated power systems and materials that Earth does not yet manufacture.
Thalek agrees.
That, he says, is why he also sells service contracts.
Captain Ellison begins to suspect that humanity's first great interstellar trade opportunity may be somewhat more complicated than advertised.
A mystery close to home
While investigating the Lantern's records, Okonkwo discovers that several Earth spacecraft have been observed by passing alien vessels.
Pioneer probes.
Voyager 1.
Voyager 2.
Humanity's first ambassadors to the outer Solar System have been attracting attention for decades.
Most traders ignored them.
A few examined them.
One apparently attached a small navigational marker to a Voyager probe before releasing it.
The discovery gives the film its most affecting sequence.
The Wayfarer follows the old observations toward an object believed to be one of the Voyager spacecraft.
It takes several days of careful searching.
The probe is found, battered and almost unimaginably primitive beside the Wayfarer.
Its power supply is exhausted.
Its antenna has suffered damage.
But its golden record remains intact.
The crew gathers to examine it.
For a moment, the grand questions of interstellar politics and commercial technology disappear.
These small machines were launched by people who did not know whether humanity would ever reach the stars.
And now their descendants have caught up with one of them.
Ellison orders that the probe be left undisturbed.
She has the ship transmit a short message toward Earth.
"Voyager has been found."
It is a small moment.
And a beautiful one.
The black object
The Voyager expedition reveals another mystery.
Measurements collected during the journey suggest that an unusual gravitational influence is affecting objects in the far outer Solar System.
The crew investigates the possibility of an undiscovered distant planet.
Their observations are tantalizing but inconclusive.
Then Okonkwo notices that the disturbance does not behave quite as expected.
There may be a compact, massive object moving on an extraordinarily distant orbit.
A primordial black hole, perhaps, or some other object sufficiently unusual to justify further investigation.
Sorel is reluctant to speculate.
Vale is delighted.
Ellison is concerned primarily with whether approaching it will damage the ship.
The matter becomes urgent when an automated cargo vessel disappears while attempting to cross the suspected object's gravitational influence.
The Wayfarer responds to a distress transmission.
And discovers that the missing vessel belongs to the Lantern's operators.
The rescue nobody authorized
The ship's owners refuse to release navigational details without a commercial agreement.
The Vulcans caution against approaching the region with the Wayfarer's limited capabilities.
Thalek offers the necessary information for an astonishing sum.
Ellison responds that people may be dying.
Thalek explains that rescue operations are expensive.
The captain decides to proceed anyway.
The ensuing sequence is exhilarating.
Using its experimental warp drive, the Wayfarer attempts to intercept the missing cargo ship while navigating an environment its instruments only partially understand.
The crew has to improvise solutions using equipment never intended for such conditions.
Vale bypasses several drive safeguards.
Okonkwo combines Vulcan navigational methods with observations from the old human probes.
Sorel contributes calculations that his own government would almost certainly have preferred him not to share.
And Thalek, contacted by the increasingly desperate captain, finally provides the missing cargo ship's navigation records.
For free.
Or, as he insists afterward, on an unusually generous deferred-payment arrangement.
The rescue succeeds.
But the Wayfarer suffers major damage.
Its warp drive is temporarily disabled.
The Lantern's owners refuse to provide assistance without a financial guarantee.
Captain Ellison finds herself stranded in the outer Solar System, surrounded by civilizations whose technology surpasses her own, wondering how humanity is supposed to survive in this extraordinary new marketplace.
Then several independent traders arrive.
They offer spare parts, engineering assistance and enough fuel to reach Mars.
Some ask for payment.
Others request future favors.
One agrees to help simply because he enjoyed watching the humans attempt something so completely unreasonable.
The repairs take days.
And during that time, the crew begins discovering how much of the interstellar community operates outside formal government relationships.
The Vulcans have not been lying about the dangers of premature technological dependence.
But they have not told the whole story either.
The message from the past
The Wayfarer returns to Earth, bringing its discoveries, damaged machinery, questionable commercial obligations and several crates of alien components that customs officials have absolutely no idea how to classify.
Captain Ellison reports to a joint scientific and governmental inquiry.
The politicians are fascinated by the possibility of acquiring advanced technology.
Industrial representatives want commercial agreements.
Military officers are concerned about the implications of alien vessels moving through the outer Solar System.
Vulcan diplomats insist that Earth should proceed cautiously.
An Andorian representative, newly arrived for what he describes as preliminary trade discussions, offers to help Earth proceed considerably faster.
The argument becomes increasingly heated.
Then the film takes an unexpected turn.
Lieutenant Okonkwo is approached by an archivist who has discovered something unusual among the ship's recovered records.
One of the navigational signatures recorded near the suspected distant black hole matches a signal associated with a classified Earth launch from 1996.
The archivist produces a data cylinder.
It has been preserved for nearly a century.
Its label reads:
FOR THOSE WHO FOLLOW.
The cylinder contains a recording of Roberta Lincoln, made years after the departure of the Botany Bay.
She is older now, composed and unmistakably amused by the absurdity of addressing people who may not yet have been born.
She explains that Gary Seven suspected the Augments' escape had been assisted by someone with knowledge of future events.
He was never able to prove who supplied the vessel with its unusual navigational information.
But he believed the destination might eventually become important.
Roberta concludes by asking whoever receives the message not to assume that every mystery requires an enemy.
Some things, she says, are simply unfinished business.
The recording ends.
Okonkwo turns toward Captain Ellison.
"Do we tell the Vulcans?"
Ellison considers the question.
"Eventually."
A handoff across time
The final scene returns to Daniels.
He is standing aboard a small observation vessel whose technology is clearly centuries beyond anything yet built on Earth.
He has been watching the Wayfarer's first voyage.
Another temporal operative asks whether the crew discovered the connection to Khan's escape.
Daniels says they found enough to become curious.
The operative suggests that further intervention may be required.
Daniels declines.
He explains that the original intervention had never been intended to create a permanent chain of control over humanity's development.
Sometimes, he suggests, the purpose of preserving a particular moment in history is to allow people to discover what they can accomplish afterward.
The other operative asks whether humanity is ready.
Daniels looks toward the battered Wayfarer, now approaching Earth.
"I doubt it."
He smiles.
"That has rarely stopped them."
The vessel disappears.
And then the credits begin
The film concludes with a short preview of the proposed companion series.
We see the Wayfarer departing again, this time with improved engines and a more permanent exploratory assignment.
There are glimpses of lunar research settlements, vast Martian industrial structures and small human stations operating in the outer Solar System.
A newly constructed vessel attempts a Warp 2 trial.
An Andorian merchant arrives at an Earth trade exhibition, immediately offending a Vulcan delegation.
A crew explores an enormous cometary body deep within the Oort Cloud.
And a human scientific expedition boards a Vulcan transport for its first carefully supervised visit to another inhabited world.
The preview ends with Captain Ellison examining a star chart.
Someone asks when humanity will finally be ready to explore the galaxy.
She replies that the galaxy appears to have come looking for them first.
The title appears.
STAR TREK: THE NEAR FRONTIER
Coming in 2005.
What the series seems to promise
The producers have avoided several obvious mistakes.
The new show is not about a younger Jonathan Archer commanding a less advanced Enterprise.
Nor is it an attempt to reproduce Deep Space Nine with an earlier date and fewer aliens.
Its central attraction is a period of human history that Star Trek has seldom explored: the long, awkward interval between First Contact and the establishment of the interstellar institutions familiar to television audiences.
This is a time when the Solar System itself remains a frontier.
Lunar settlements require careful engineering to provide comfortable living conditions. Some use rotating or canted maglev habitat sections to simulate Earth-like gravity. Others are beginning to experiment with costly imported gravity technology.
Martian industry is growing, but travel between worlds remains inconvenient and expensive.
The Oort Cloud and distant trans-Neptunian regions contain mysteries sufficiently interesting to sustain entire expeditions.
Early warp vessels are opening nearby star systems, but journeys remain long enough to require serious planning.
And the most important scientific discoveries need not concern alien civilizations at all.
There are still things humanity does not understand about its own home system.
The potential for adventure is enormous.
Friends, competitors and neighbors
Perhaps the most promising element is the relationship between Earth, Vulcan and Andoria.
The producers appear determined not to make the Vulcans secretly malevolent or the Andorians uniformly heroic.
The Vulcans are genuinely concerned that humanity may acquire dangerous technologies before developing the ability to use them safely.
They have good reasons.
They also possess commercial and strategic interests of their own.
The Andorians are more willing to sell advanced equipment, share navigational information and make deals that the Vulcans consider irresponsible.
They are not necessarily acting out of generosity.
Humanity represents a new market, a possible political partner and an opportunity to influence the balance of power in the local neighborhood.
One suspects that many of the series' best episodes will arise from the differences between these approaches.
The Vulcans will caution.
The Andorians will offer alternatives.
The humans will listen to both, misunderstand half of what they hear, and occasionally discover a better solution by trying something neither side recommended.
And sometimes the humans will be wrong.
That, too, could make good television.
The shadow of Khan
The mysterious connection between the Botany Bay, Gary Seven and the distant outer Solar System is plainly intended to sustain a longer story.
The filmmakers deserve credit for not resolving it immediately.
Khan himself does not return as a new villain.
He is not secretly commanding an empire or directing events from a hidden installation.
Instead, the circumstances of his escape suggest a larger question about Earth's history.
Who possessed the means to assist his departure?
Why was an experimental sleeper vessel provided with navigational information apparently beyond the science of its time?
And were the people who arranged the escape attempting to help Khan, protect Earth, or ensure that some event yet to occur would remain possible?
Daniels knows more than he says.
But the film wisely refuses to make him the answer to everything.
His presence connects the new series to Enterprise while preserving the freedom of the new characters to make their own discoveries.
A different sort of Star Trek
The most refreshing quality of The Near Frontier is its willingness to be small.
Small, at least, by the standards of modern science-fiction television.
Its first great adventure concerns a trading station in the outer Solar System.
Its climactic rescue saves a handful of people.
Its most affecting discovery is an ancient spacecraft carrying greetings from Earth.
Its principal conflicts arise from incomplete knowledge, competing interests and the entirely understandable desire of a young civilization to become more than it presently is.
There are no enormous fleets threatening the destruction of humanity.
No ancient beings issuing pronouncements about the destiny of the universe.
No mysterious force demanding that one extraordinary individual save all existence.
There is a ship.
There is a crew.
There are interesting places to go.
And there are neighbors whose intentions are neither entirely reassuring nor necessarily hostile.
The movie also possesses something occasionally missing from contemporary Star Trek: the simple pleasure of watching capable people enjoy doing difficult things together.
Captain Ellison trusts her crew.
Her engineers complain.
Her Vulcan adviser becomes progressively more exasperated.
The Andorian trader is impossible.
And all of them, rather to their own surprise, find reasons to help one another.
It is a thoroughly agreeable way to spend two hours.
Will we be watching?
Probably.
The proposed series faces obvious difficulties.
Its limited technological setting could become restrictive if the writers insist upon comparing every episode with the voyages of later starships.
The temporal mystery surrounding Khan and Gary Seven could overwhelm the program if it becomes the principal reason every event occurs.
And the producers will have to resist the temptation to explain every familiar invention, diplomatic relationship and historical achievement from later Star Trek.
But the premise is sufficiently different from Enterprise to justify its existence.
There is a great deal of territory between the Moon and the nearest stars.
There are entire generations whose lives must have been shaped by the first commercial contacts with alien civilizations.
And there is something delightful about imagining a period when a human engineer might regard an imported artificial-gravity generator with the same mixture of amazement, suspicion and excitement that an earlier generation brought to its first automobile.
If the series remembers that sense of wonder, it may have found a rather appealing corner of the Star Trek universe.
We will certainly return for the occasional voyage.
Particularly if the producers remember to bring back Thalek sh'Renn.
I should very much like to discover whether the Andorian ever manages to collect the outstanding balance on those gravity generators.
And I suspect Captain Ellison would like to know as well.
Final verdict
Star Trek: The Near Frontier is not the most ambitious science-fiction television event of the year.
It may, however, be one of the most enjoyable.
It remembers that exploration does not begin only when a civilization develops its fastest spaceship.
Sometimes it begins when someone discovers that an unfamiliar neighbor has been operating a trading post just beyond the edge of the map.
And that the neighbor has something interesting to sell.
Just be careful about the warranty.
Editor's note from our side of the Quantum Mirror, November 2026: This review describes an entirely fictional 2004 television production and proposed 2005 companion series in an imagined alternate Star Trek timeline. The series, characters created for it, recovered review and production details are speculative fiction, not actual historical discoveries. The established Star Trek characters and settings remain the property of their respective rights holders. This is an independent, unofficial fan-fiction and alternate-history project.
