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Enterprise: Hatchery (2004)
What on Earth was the point of putting the "Star Trek" brand on this episode?
There's no spoilers here, since it's made clear very early in the episode: this is an episode, purportedly of a "Star Trek" series (the series name itself was changed during this very season to include "Star Trek") where the crew of the Enterprise encounters a nursery full of alien infants in enemy territory, and decides, in the end, to leave them to die, because the only way, the show informs us, that we'd want to save the lives of infants born to our enemies is if we were affected by insidious mind control. It's sick, and I wouldn't subject my children to this filth.
The captain insists that they do what they can to care for these infants for the sake of the crew's own humanity. Again, I want to stress: these are helpless infants. It's already bogglingly against the message behind "Star Trek", its CORE message, that the crew would disagree with this assessment. It's even worse that the captain's passionate - and correct - defense of his decisions only exists, per this episode, because he's been poisoned by the infants early on in the episode. Poisoned, I guess, with even an ounce of human feeling or compassion, otherwise absent from this episode!
At the show's apparent attempt at a climax, we're invited by camera angles, lighting, musical cues and the response of other characters, to feel disgust and horror that the Captain would allow these infants to touch his pristine body. We're supposed to feel disgust not because these infants are malevolent villains in disguise or anything like that, but because THEY LOOK DIFFERENT FROM US. BECAUSE THEY LOOK DIFFERENT, and FOR NO OTHER REASON, even though they are INNOCENT INFANTS, we're supposed to be disgusted by their touch and wish them dead, and to view their survival as secondary to the mission of bombing the enemy! There is no "Star Trek" to be found here.
Anyone who has ever watched even a single other episode of "Star Trek", unless they are completely unable to grasp the message behind it, would agree: whether or not you agree with this (repulsive) conclusion, it is COMPLETELY antithetical to the message of the show going back to its very foundation. Extremely disappointing - again, I would not for a second expose my children to the message behind this episode, and I suggest you do not do the same. Whether you wish to subject yourself to it is your business: it's a great example of how severely this show went astray at the time.