Star Trek: Enterprise (TV Series) The Aenar (2005) User Reviews

Excellent Conclusion of a Trilogy

[claudio_carvalho · 9/10 · 23 April 2010]

T'Pol researches the data that Trip and Reed got from the Drone and finds that the ship is telepathically controlled by an Andorian. Shran receives the analysis from Andor and informs that a highly telepathic but pacific subspecies called Aenar is remotely controlling the marauder. Together with Trip and Phlox, T'Pol builds a tele presence unit to interfere with the Drone while Archer and Shran try to convince the Aenar to help them since they need a powerful telepath to operate the unit. They discover that the local Gared was abducted and may be helping the Romulans; however his sister Jhamel is decided to help her brother using the tele presence unit in Enterprise.

"The Aenar" is an excellent conclusion of a trilogy. The story is engaging, with great dialogs, and the screenplay uses a beautiful visual concept in the ice. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "Aenar"

An excellent conclusion to the Romulan trilogy.

[planktonrules · 9/10 · 30 May 2015]

Late in the life of "Star Trek: Enterprise", the writers came up with three fabulous and exciting episodes involving the Romulans trying to destabilize the quadrant and prevent alliances between the Andorians and Tellurites. However, Enterprise is able to determine that some sort of drone is sowing discord--as it can imitate other ships and the recent attacks on an Andorian ship was NOT done by the Tellurites but this drone!

This particular episode brings the crew to a remote frozen location to look for any of the Aenar--a subspecies of Andorians who apparently are the ones piloting the evil drone for the Romulans. It's odd, as the Aenar are a peaceful, blind race and you wonder why any of them would kill for these Romulans.

Overall, this is a fine conclusion to the trilogy. It's well written, exciting and well worth seeing. Plus, I like ANY show featuring Shran!

The Enterprise Outwits the Romulans

[Samuel-Shovel · 7/10 · 6 March 2018]

In "The Aenar", the Enterprise learns that the mystery drone is being controlled telepathically by a member of an Andorian minority group known as an Aenar. Archer and Shran head to the Aenar colony on Andoria and learn that, although the Aenars are a peaceful people, one of their members went missing a few years ago with no explanation. The Aenar refuse to get involved in the war but Jhamel, sister of the missing Aenar, agrees to help in order to save her brother. The Enterprise creates a device to telepathically disrupt the Romulans' drone in the hopes of destroying it. Jhamel communicates with her brother, convincing him to destroy the drones. The Romulans kill the pilot in frustration. As the episode ends, Trip asks Archer for a transfer, no longer feeling confident in his abilities aboard Enterprise due to the distractions his relationship with T'Pol is causing him.

Season 4 has been chalk full of these 3 part story arcs so far and I think this one has been the best of the bunch. Even though "The Aenar" was my least favorite episode of the trilogy, it does a good enough job wrapping up the plotline and its threads effectively. I enjoyed the Aenar people as a whole though. I did feel as if we spent too much time setting up this plotline about Trip being bad at his job now due to T'Pol.

I also didn't understand what Gareb's motivations were. Why did he agree to kill people if he was a pacifist? He thought he was the last Aenar but that doesn't explain why he decided to start helping the Romulans after they kidnapped him. That scene felt like it could have been fleshed out a bit more.

This has been a solid trilogy of episodes. The Andorians help bring a lot to the table and I loved how much screentime Shran receives. The dawning of the Federation is upon us.

The storyline with the Aenar and Romulans was great

[txriverotter · 9/10 · 9 July 2022]

...but the subplot of Trip and T'Pol's ongoing fromance, brings it down a notch. Especially Trip's cop-out in the end.

I understand Trip is worried about T'Pol using the telepresence machine, but they are both Starfleet, and even more than that, they're both officers.

But here again we have Trip written as the lovestruck puppy, while also being exceedingly arrogant, insisting only he can build the machine. He refuses to rest because "I alone can fix it." We all know how that mentality works out.

In the end when Trip asks for a transfer, he claims it's because he missed a "10 point variance" on some setting on the machine, and that it was due to his mind not being on the job. We're led to believe it's because of his obsession with T'Pol, but he's been distracted by her for two seasons. Why 'suddenly' can he not do his job properly?

I think it was rather that he refused to rest in his arrogance, and that is what contributed to his mistake. And likely to his overly irrational behavior with T'Pol and the machine. He's been shown to forego rest to the point of exhaustion, even forcing Phlox to relieve him from duty temporarily until he gets some sleep.

Trip is the chief engineer, but surely he's not the only good one on Enterprise. He has an entire team of engineers, that are apparently too stupid to function without him looking over their shoulders. I don't remember Geordi ever acting that way, and even Torres trusted her team to do their jobs.

I'm not a fan of Trip's character anyway. The writers made him loudmouth, obnoxious and arrogant from the get-go, and then never gave him a chance to grow throughout the series. He kept running his mouth when he shouldn't, judging other alien races by human ideals and making questionable decisions.

Goodness know, he's not the only one. The writers practically made Archer bi-polar in his personality; going from one extreme to the other by episode. But they at least gave him 'some' growth as the series went on.

T'Pol is the only character we really saw substantial growth in as each season progressed. She went from rigid Vulcan to relaxed Vulcan, with a deep understanding and friendship with humans and respect for other races she would never have considered previously, like Andorians.

I wish they would've treated every main player to that same standard. Poor Travis and Reed not only got zero growth, they were almost treated as side-characters in the last season.

The Romulans Are Enterprising

[Hitchcoc · 10/10 · 30 March 2017]

This is an excellent concluding episode to this Romulan trilogy. All through the Star Trek epic, the Romulans seem to be the most humorless, the most intractable of all species. With the exception of the Borg, which is a mass entity, these guys take no prisoners and listen to no one. They are rooted in Vulcan ancestry and have tremendous technology and the power of evil. In this final episode they are using a subspecies of Andorean who has telepathic powers. They've hooked him up to a machine and he controls drones that can take on the appearance of other ships. Archer and Shran go to Adorea and visit a pacifistic people that live in the northern ice. It is a fascinating world. It turns out that the controller is the brother of one of the aliens and she decides to accompany the pair to the Enterprise. The conclusion is excellent and takes us to other levels of science fiction. And, of course, we will be hearing more from the Romulans.

Good conclusion

[snoozejonc · 8/10 · 16 December 2020]

Archer and Shran go to Andoria to investigate the pilot of the Romulan drone ship.

This is an enjoyable episode the contains good insight into the Andorian peoples and another excellent performance from Jeffery Coombs.

The plot is fairly simple and provides some interesting information about the Aenar and a plausible conclusion to the main plot of the trilogy. The scenes on Andoria are generally enjoyable as it's good to see the cold environment to give context to the species. The sub-plot focuses on the awkward situation developing between T'Pol and Trip Tucker and it feels like there is more of this to come.

All performances are good, particularly Jeffery Coombs who is once more the standout actor.

This trilogy overall is the most enjoyable arc in Enterprise so far. It works far more within the Star Trek franchise than everything that came before it. It feels a shame it all finished at the end of series 4 as for me it is just starting to get interesting.

For me it is a 7.5/10, but as always I like to round upwards.

Not all Andorians are blue!

[Tweekums · 8/10 · 30 July 2010]

The treaty of cooperation between the Andorians and the Tellarites may have been signed but the Marauder is still out there and presents a danger. Analysis of the pilot's brainwaves shows that he is a member of a secretive sub-species of Andorians known as the Aenar. The Aenar are white-skinned, blind, live in the coldest region of Andoria and most importantly they are telepaths. Shren and Captain Archer beam down to their caverns but it appears that they have wasted their time as the pacifist Aenar refuse to help. One of them however says she will help them; she is the Sister of the Jhamel who was abducted to pilot the Marauder. When they set off again they find themselves under attack from two Marauders, Lissan must contact her brother and persuade him to end the conflict.

This was a great conclusion to the three-part story; it was good to see Archer and Shren cooperating again and it was interesting to learn more about Andoria. Lissan was a good character; the scene between her and her brother was quite touching. As the episode ended it looked as if Enterprise may lose a crewmember; Trip is clearly having difficulty working with T'Pol as he still has strong feelings for her.

Endings are often unfulfilling. A good episode but too formulaic to be really fun.

[wwcanoer-tech · 8/10 · 9 December 2021]

It's Star Trek, so there's never any real suspense as to who will win, it's a matter of how, and the story that can be weaved.

Destroying the two marauder ships is almost useless (because more can be built) but is the set as the climax.

The real objective should be to learn who, where and why these ships were built. Why don't the writers weave an interesting story during Jhamel's contact with her brother Jared?

The first objective is to have Jared stop hurting Enterprise but best if he can do that without letting the Romulans know so that he has time to talk with his sister. Could he miss a few shots? Feign that something is broken on his ship? Covertly sabotage something? We need him to explain that it's the Romulans controlling the ships and something about their plans. Most interesting if Jhamel can ask Jared to do certain things.

It would be best for Enterprise to recover one of the ships, so ask Jared to sabotage one of the ships. Most easily, he would have one ship destroy the communications array on the other. Or he would hold one ship steady and tell Enterprise where to hit it.

I was surprised that Jared was aware that he had killed so many people. The Romulans had stated that they were medicating him, so I expected him to be confused about what's going on despite being able to control the ships. Perhaps that's too big of a contradiction to explain but it's also difficult to convince someone that at least four other species are his enemy, so that's tenuous too. I could see the Romulans feeding him false images so that he thinks that he's always fighting one fictitious enemy, however the images need to be correct enough for him to target the desired critical systems, so that would be tricky but let him be truly mislead.

The writers once again rely on Enterprise to be the sole hero, even after having many species work together for the first time in the last episode. So, why doesn't that continue? Why isn't there some new detection grid and warships standing by to outwit and attack these marauders? Wouldn't that be more interesting? Why make every episode so formulaic?!

How much remote control do the Romulans have without Jared?

Imagine if Jared could give the control codes to Jhamel, so she gains rudimentary control of one ship. Then the Romulans kill Jared but keep some control of other ship and try to bring it home but Jhamel is able to destroy it. The Romulans and Jhamel then fight for control of the second ship but Jhamel is able to sabotage it or control it enough that Enterprise can destroy it.

There's so much that could be done with this other than the illogical situation of two ships controlled by one person yet evading each other. It's possible that they could have explained that the defensive moves are automatic, so Jhamel couldn't make a ship stand still and be shot. We could see him really struggling to accomplish the task.

These were definitely fun engaging episodes that are a step above many Enterprise episodes. I simply think that they could do much better,

Archer and Shran once again fight for interplanetary peace

[tomsly-40015 · 8/10 · 16 April 2024]

This episode forms the conclusion of another trilogy as part of the fourth season - individual episodes in the style of "Alien of the week" are rather rare in the final season. As we know, it didn't help in the end. This series, unlike its predecessors from the 1990s, did not make it to seven seasons.

The Romulans try to sow discord between Andorians, Tellarites and humans with false flag actions. But Archer and Shran get on the trail of this plot and in the end we see the first steps towards building a federation of planets: the first alliances between these species as a bulwark against enemies from outside.

It has now become an unwritten law at ENT that once again Shran is not far when Andoria is involved. Apparently the Imperial Guard only consists of a handful of members. Would fit the ice planet Andoria, which doesn't exactly show many signs of a technologically advanced civilization or looks like a densely populated planet. The way alien civilizations are portrayed in Star Trek is often quite ridiculous. For example, Shran says that the Aenar subspecies was discovered on his planet only 50 years ago. That sounds pretty unimaginable. A civilization that has reached a certain level of development would not only have explored every last corner of its own planet, but would also have technologies such as satellites or sensor networks to detect any anomalies. The fact that an intelligent, humanoid and developed species that also builds its own cities (and requires resources for this) has only recently been discovered, even though the Andorians have been building warp-capable spaceships for a long time, is a typically romanticized storytelling in the Star Trek universe.

Otherwise, this episode gives you a good insight into the lives of Andorians and the Aenar. With Hemmer, an Aenar is later even part of the Enterprise crew.