Still, the show wasn’t a total loss. The series becomes pretty darn good when Manny Coto gets appointed showrunner, and eventually everyone comes to admit that the theme song is a genuine earworm. Moreover, the show does have some great characters, including Jeffrey Combs’ Shran, Jolene Blalock’s T’Pol, and John Billingsley’s Dr. Phlox. Best of all was the guy who shouldn’t have worked at all, a guy whose George W. Bush-style accent and turns genocidal in the Xindi War should have made him age just as badly as the rest of the show. Yet, somehow, Connor Trinneer made Commander Charles “Trip” Tucker III the best character in the worst show, and one of the best Star Trek characters of all time.
Even though it tried to set itself so apart from the franchise that it even avoided putting “Star Trek” in its title credits for season one, Enterprise wanted to get back to Trek basics. Set 100 before The Original Series, the series had a swaggering captain in Archer, who butted heads against his Vulcan XO and bonded with a folksy human, replicating the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triumvirate from TOS. As Archer guided his ship, the NX-01, into deep space, the duo would help him make sense of the aliens he would encounter in Starfleet’s early, pre-Federation days.
Trip Tucker may not have been a physician like McCoy, but he did take the role of a good ol’ Southerner, slightly annoyed to be in space. In a disastrous plotting decision, Enterprise‘s creators didn’t make Trip the only guy who didn’t immediately like aliens. Archer carried a massive chip on his shoulder for the way Vulcans mistreated his father, Reed (Dominic Keating) resented the fact that he couldn’t carry the family tradition of serving at sea, and even T’Pol initially carried her people’s condescension toward aliens. In fact, only the space-born Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery), the linguist Hoshi Sato (Linda Park), and the open-minded Denobulan Phlox seemed to like trekking through the stars.
However, unlike the other characters, Trip had a certain politeness and Southern charm that allowed him to go willingly into strange situations.
Nothing demonstrates that better than the first Trip-focused episode, “Unexpected” from season 1.
Turns out, the ritual was in fact a mating ritual for Xyrillians, a society in which the males carry the pregnancy. Moreover, the physiological treatment Phlox gave Trip before visiting the ship allowed him to be receptive to Ah’Len, which means that he is now pregnant with her child.
“Unexpected” certainly has elements of the space sexiness that Berman and Braga injected into the first half of Enterprise, and the whole concept of a man getting pregnant could play like the Schwarzenegger movie Junior or some other bland boomer joke. But Trinneer keeps things grounded, staying in the mode of a regular guy scared by the surprise changes to his body. He retains a sweetness all the way through, where we find ourselves not laughing (much) at the fact that a man is carrying a child.
Those qualities particularly shine through in perhaps the best Trip Tucker episode, “Similitude” from season 3.
