Last Night’s Enterprise (spoilers)

Worst Episode EVER!
Are my husband and I the only people in the lower 48 watching this show? It seems like it sometimes. If that’s the case, the writers should not antagonize us, as they did so egregiously last night.
The word spoilers never seemed so appropriate: the show stank morally, dramatically, and every other way you could think of. Good points first: they showed the Captain’s dog. Hambet is always pleased when they show the dog. I think he thinks the dog is the star of the show.
The premise of the episode is that Tucker, the chief engineer, suffers “neural damage” in an accident and needs some kind of transplanted “neural tissue” to recover from his coma. I guess in the future they don’t have ordinary closed-head and spinal cord injuries. Time, of course, is of the essence since they are in some kind of anomaly field and the ship’s getting covered with big blobs of metallic crud — the typical Treknobabble setup. They need Tucker to recover so that he can come up with the way to get them out of the field so they can go hunt down the evil Xindi and Save Earth. (Apparently they set out with only one officer in Engineering who went to engineering school, and there’s nobody else in the department who can be promoted. So without Tucker the whole mission is in jeopardy and the Earth is doomed.)
In the future they also seem to have forgotten all about the promising adult stem-cell experiments run in the twenty-first century. Instead, Dr Phlox (creepy alien ship’s doctor) uses some kind of alien critter’s skin as a substrate and they make a “symbiont” — actually, a clone — of Tucker (a procedure illegal on the critter’s home planet.)
First objection: Trek writers. Don’t try to pull a fast one on us. They didn’t make a symbiont. They made a clone.
Bigger objection: nobody seemed to have any problem with this at all. Captain Archer gives only a token three seconds of reflection before he concludes I don’t care what we’ve gotta do, we’ve got to save Tucker so we can Go Save Earth! And nobody is shown even suggesting to him that this is wrong.
Clones made from this critter, like the animal clones being made now, mature and age rapidly. So the clone, which they cruelly name “Sym,” goes from infancy to adulthood in about a week, with a life expectancy of fifteen days. And in a touch of extremely bogus science that brings the ol’ voluntary suspension of disbelief crashing to the floor, Sym has Tucker’s memories. He actually thinks he is Tucker until they tell him the truth.
The Trek writers wimp out and do not show the moment when they tell Sym the truth. They just show him afterwards looking extremely happy and well-adjusted, as if learning that all your memories are false and that you were actually concocted in the lab with the express purpose of providing tissue for a transplant isn’t anything that would shake you up. Sym conveniently possesses Tucker’s memories of engineering school, so he sets about making himself useful down in the engine room.
It comes time to perform the transplant, and it becomes apparent that, contrary to initial expectations, Sym will not survive the tissue donation. Archer is angry but wants to proceed with the surgery. For a moment the clone behaves somewhat realistically when he angrily resists — he wants to live out his life. Archer warns him that he doesn’t “want to be forced” to force Sym to submit to the surgery.
Now, instead doing something really dramatic and showing Archer marching Sym to the O.R. under an armed guard, the writers wimp out again. Sym sulks for a couple of minutes and then cheerfully trots off to give up his neural tissue: “I guess this what I’m here for!” He is even shown thanking the crew for a happy life. Problem solved. The transplant is successful and Tucker recovers so quickly, he’s able to attend his clone’s funeral.
And are they going to show Tucker’s reaction next week, when he learns about the short life of his identical twin? (Tucker recently lost his only sister when the evil aliens attacked Earth.) If they do, I doubt they’ll show him doing anything more than shrugging it off.
If TV shows are going to be entertainment, let them be entertainment. But if they’re going to try to Look At The Issues, then they shouldn’t wimp out.
I complain again that they are also showing way too much of the Vulcan woman. This “Vulcan acupressure” she’s teaching Tucker seems to entail postures that are less about acupressure than about seriously titillating adolescent male viewers. Even the sexuality on this show is cynical and jaded. The original Enterprise certainly had its implied sins against chastity, but even with their torn shirts and go-go boots, Captain Kirk and his crew seemed a bit more professional and concerned with decorum than this bunch (and more sincere and likeable in their amorousness.)
I know, Pansy and Victor, we should be watching Angel instead, but it comes on at nine and we are early-to-bed types. Plus, we haven’t been watching it, so we’d have no clue as to what was going on.