WarpGirl wrote:honeybee wrote:Or maybe Archer just didn't think, in the heat of the moment, to make that argument.
See that right there is the thing that gets me. I can recognize if they made it clear he tried every arguement he had (for a reasonable amount of time) and went through everything with his crew and MACO's but they made it clear he didn't do any of that. None of it!
And he had the time to argue with T'Pol and plan the mission. While we see everything condenced into 45 min hours pass in the episode.
As SB said. Enterprise wasn't an explorer's ship at the time, she was a warship and Archer had absolutely NO TIME to go asking others, what they think about it. He knew that he was crossing a line, ethically, which is why he asked Phlox about having to make an unethical decision. To me his 'worries' were actually somewhat exaggerated, because:
- he ordered a ship full of Klingons to be blown to kingdom come
- he tortured the alien in the airlock
- his orders resulted in the destruction of the Seleya
- he had Phlox create a sentient being, just to harvest some tissue and let it die (Sim)
- he tampered with the mind of another being (Degra in "Strategem")
I think he had suspended some of his humanity way before the encounter with the Illyrians and he had to do so, else the mission would have failed. If anything, season 3 shows, just how dirty a business war is.
I may be over-analyzing, but I think it is also a political message. Most conflicts since the 90's were publically made appear to be just a series of surgically precise strikes against military installations and personell with no harm done to civilians. ENT dared to show that no one stays without guilt in wartime, even if the cause is justified.
To me it was disappointig that Archer's problems lasted only for one episode ("Home"). I think he was "healed" too quickly. Rigil Kent does a good job in "Divergent Paths", showing how Archer struggles with the aftermath of losing crewmembers, partly as the result of his own orders.