Saluting Enterprise’s Trip Tucker, the Best Character on the Worst Star Trek Show
Enterprise is lesser Trek, but Trip Tucker was a top-level character.
As time goes on, the golden era of ’90s Star Trek looks better and better. But no matter how much you get annoyed by the teenage antics on Starfleet Academy, and no matter how much you miss 24-episode seasons, you have to admit that Star Trek: Enterprise stinks. The otherwise likable Scott Bakula plays Captain Jonathan Archer as a man both baffled and irritated by new life and new civilizations, he’s saddled with a crew of nobodies like Malcolm Reed and Travis Mayweather, and the time-travel nonsense of the first season gets worse with the post-9/11 bravado of the Xindi War that takes up the second and third seasons.
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.
Ugly Americans in the Stars
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.
The Unexpected Charm of Trip Tucker
Nothing demonstrates that better than the first Trip-focused episode, “Unexpected” from season 1. Written by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga and directed by Mike Vejar, “Unexpected” sees Trip visit a Xyrillian ship to help with their engine troubles. He quickly bonds with the Xyrillian engineer Ah’Len (Julianne Christie), who tells him about her culture and performs a ritual in which they touch hands and share minds.
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. Written by Coto and directed by LeVar Burton, “Similitude” introduces a classic Trek dilemma. When Trip gets grievously injured in the show’s open, Phlox recommends creating a rapidly-aging clone to replace the damaged organs. However, the clone quickly shows signs of sentience and agency, forcing Archer and crew to realize that they’re killing one life form to save another.
Trip remains camotose for much of the episode, while Trinneer plays the clone, named “Sim.” The dual performance not only allows Trinneer to play a more openly sweet and innocent character, but also serves as a referendum on Trip as a character, showing us just what a good person he is. As Archer, T’Pol, and others respond to Sim as a mirror for Trip, they realize his importance to not just the ship, but also his importance as a person. In fact, the episode desperately needs us to see that Trip matters as a person so that we accept Sim’s sacrifice and avoid the ongoing debate launched by the spiritually-similar Voyager episode “Tuvix.”
Trip Tucker Must Die
Audacious as “Similitude” is, the gambit works. Thanks to Trinneer’s work in previous episodes, thanks to the strong Trip stories up until this point, we also understand that he must live, even if we lose the innocent Sim in the process. Even more impressive, “Similitude” comes around the same time that Tucker has become more reactionary after the death of his sister in the Xindi War. The scripts may call for him to push Archer toward war crimes, but we treat his actions as an out-of-character response to tragedy. We’re still on Trip’s side.
Of course, the audience’s love for Trip makes the end of Enterprise that much more painful. Not only does the show finally start to find its feet in its fourth and final season, and not only is the finale presented as a holodeck simulation watched by The Next Generation‘s Commander Riker, but Trip suddenly gets killed. Even with the knowledge that non-canonical novels retconned Trip’s death to make him a spy for Section 31 (ugh), the plot point feels every bit like a desperate move to give weight to the episode.
Which it is, and that’s why Trip Tucker had to die. It couldn’t have been one of the other likable characters, T’Pol or Phlox, because they’re both aliens, and it couldn’t have been any of the humans, because audiences don’t care about them. We had to lose Trip for the finale to have any weight, because he’s the best character on the show, the one consistently great part of the otherwise unexceptional Enterprise.