The episode begins with Hoshi Sato in Sickbay, making clicking sounds at a slug. No, not Dr. Phlox. She’s looking in on the first bona fide alien life form the Enterprise crew has managed to discover all on their own, a three-inch metaphor slug. It isn’t doing well outside its native environment, and Hoshi is concerned that her bringing it aboard will lead to its death. “She doesn’t look any better, does she?” she asks the doctor. It’s an alien slug in a terrarium. How good can it possibly look? Phlox points out, “She? We haven’t been able to determine its gender, if it has one.” Hoshi, having been touched by the magic of the metaphor slug, is seeing her own life issues in the slug’s predicament. “She wasn’t meant to be in this environment,” Hoshi declares. The doctor promises to do his best to keep it alive, which cheers Hoshi up until Phlox explains in a Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade voice, “I was thinking of my Pyrithian bat. It won’t eat anything once it’s dead, mm-hmm.”
Trip walks into sickbay on a thin pretext, and asks after the slug’s health. “How’s Sluggo?” Hoshi tells him, “She’s barely moved all day.” Again, it’s an alien slug. Given no information to compare to, how much is it supposed to move around? Maybe it evolved to remain motionless when stared at by twitchy comm officers. Trip complains, “We’ve been out here for two weeks, and the only first contact we’ve made is with a dyin’ worm.” Yeah, it’s been two weeks already. Why haven’t they been everywhere and seen everything yet?
After the opening credits, we join Capt. Archer in his ready room, where he is hunting down a phantom squeak under the deckplates, as T’Pol enters with a report. As Archer is on his knees trying to pinpoint the sound, I’m pretty sure T’Pol checks out his ass. She is otherwise completely uninterested in the problem. She gives her report. “A scan of the sectors ahead indicate little chance of finding inhabited planets.” Nor does the Vulcan database point to anything that might be of interest. Archer finds that hard to believe until he remembers that Vulcans never do anything interesting. “My people don’t share your enthusiasm for exploration,” she explains. Makes me wonder why the Vulcans ever bothered to go into space in the first place. To ship off the Romulans, most likely. She then reminds Archer, “Space is vast, Captain.” She’s half right. Last week, space was big. This week, it’s vast. I see she’s getting plenty of use out of her “Learn English in Ten Words a Day” calendar. “Only one out of 43,000 planets supports intelligent life.” The preceding statement in no way affects the plot of this episode. However, it’s going to come up in a trivia contest someday, and I wanted to prepare my readers for it. “There’s gotta be someone out here,” Archer insists, choosing to combat statistics with hopeful zeal. T’Pol is not impressed, near as I can tell.
The door chimes, and Hoshi walks in, standing in exactly the same hands-behind-the-back pose as T’Pol. After a moment of awkward silence, T’Pol wanders away. Another trivia question: Hoshi’s original quarters aboard ship were on E deck, section 5, starboard side. She has come to the captain to complain, “The stars are going the wrong way, sir.” She can’t sleep because the stars outside her window are moving left to right instead of right to left. She’s found someone who will switch with her if the captain approves, which he does with so much speed and so little concern that it probably wasn’t worth his time even to bring it up. The whole thing could’ve been handled with a memo. After receiving his blessing, she makes no move to leave the room, as if she has something else to say. “Is there something else, Hoshi?” Archer asks, snapping her out of her stupor. Whatever it was, she’s saving it for a more dramatically appropriate moment. As she leaves, Archer hears the phantom squeak again. If I were him, I would’ve had Hoshi use her superior listening skills to spot it for him.
We go now to the torpedo room, where Reed and Mayweather are running targeting simulations. They launch a simulated missile at a simulated target and simulate missing it by three meters. Considering the size of most ships, that doesn’t seem to be that big a deal, but Reed is all about putting the missile exactly where he wants it. “All this should’ve been dealt with before we left Earth,” Reed grumbles. The young Starfleet seems to have sent them out on their mission hoping they’d have time to calibrate everything before they needed to shoot anyone. “Have they detected any inhabited planets or vessels?” Reed asks Mayweather. “No.” “Good.” Reed, unlike everyone else on the ship, doesn’t want to come across any aliens until he’s confident he can blow them up. I can’t help but admire his attitude. Archer arrives to check on their progress. Hearing about the simulated failure, he asks, “Are you sure it’s not the simulations that are off?” Reed replies, “There’s only one way to find out.” To Reed’s delight, Archer calls the bridge and tells T’Pol to bring the ship out of warp. “It’s time for a little target practice.”
A torpedo flies through space toward an unsuspecting asteroid. If the torpedo’s purpose was to frighten the asteroid, then it was a perfect shot. Everyone back on the Enterprise seems disappointed as it explodes harmlessly, safely distant from anything that might be a target, so probably it wasn’t. Archer orders another torpedo readied for launch as enthusiastically as if he were paying for them out of his own pocket. There’s a way cool torpedo loading sequence, followed by the launch. This one skims the target asteroid, damaging only itself, and wobbily turns to head back where it came from. The bridge crew starts to worry, but has enough discipline not to start panicking, Hoshi just barely. The torpedo explodes a safe distance away. When Reed explains that the next thing he intends to tinker with will take almost a day to complete, Archer orders the ship underway. “Make your modifications. We’ll run another test first chance we get.” Poor Reed. His first chance to blow something up, and he muffs it.
In the galley, Trip joins Dr. Phlox at a table. Trip asks, “Sluggo any better?” for which Phlox punishes him by making him eat a baby roasted potato Phlox has already bitten into. “Re-sequenced protein,” Trip observes with distaste. Phlox enjoys the flavor, though. Phlox reveals, “On my home world, people would never think of speaking during a meal,” as it would waste time better used for eating. Trip picks up on the segue. “Wastin’ time seems to be all we been doin’.” Apparently, Trip watched all the old Star Trek episodes and saw those crews meeting up with aliens every week, so going two weeks with nothing but an ailing gastropod to show for it is rubbing him the wrong way. Phlox disagrees, claiming “Every moment has been an adventure for me.” He goes on to describe a series of observations he has made about various crewmen which can best be described as stalkerly. “If I am not mistaken, [Crewmen Bennett and Tatum] are preparing to mate. Do you think they might let me watch?”
Back on the bridge, T’Pol has made an extraordinary discovery. Well, she spotted another ship, floating motionless three light years from the closest star system. You don’t see that every day. Every couple of weeks, sure, but not every day. T’Pol, Archer, and Trip all hunch over a display table, looking at the sensor data, and discussing it. Trip suggests, “Maybe we should go and have a look.” Archer is keen on the idea, but T’Pol is as wet a blanket as ever. “If you insist on allowing your curiosity to dictate your actions….” The look on Archer’s face says it before the mouth part of his face verbalizes it, “We insist.”
The Enterprise approaches the other ship, scanning like madmen. No engine power, no weapons, no comm traffic. Archer decides to transmit a greeting to the derelict, which is processed through a “translation matrix.” I’m not sure what good it did without knowing what language to translate the speech into. While Hoshi does comm officer things to make sure the other ship receives the message no matter what kind of space radio they might be using, Trip zooms the viewscreen in on the access hatch, which further scanning shows to have been blown out with, as T’Pol describes it, “a high yield particle impact.” In other words that T’Pol was downright smug about not using, weapons fire. Still receiving no response to his little speech, Archer asks, “Are we close enough to scan for biosigns?” T’Pol warns that scanning the interior of the mystery ship might be seen as an invasion of privacy, and suggests that maybe whoever is over there is just ignoring the Enterprise. Nag, nag, nag. Partly to piss her off, I’m sure, Archer orders the biosign scan, which detects several life signs too faint to be differentiated by the sensors. Then, instead of running through the rest of the “What to do when a derelict ship won’t talk to you” protocols like T’Pol wants to do, Archer orders Reed to prepare a shuttle for launch. Hoshi thinks that T’Pol might have a point and wants to keep trying to contact them, but Archer tells her to, “Suit up, Ensign.” She’s going with.
It just struck me that Hoshi has Uhura’s job. It now seems like a much more interesting line of work than just saying, “Hailing frequencies open,” twice an episode.
Coming back from commercial, Trip catches up with the captain as he’s walking down a hallway and requests to go on the trip to the other ship. “I have a translator and a security officer. Why would I need an engineer?” Archer asks. Trip first lamely tries to justify why an engineer might be needed, “You might need somebody to help you figure out the turbolifts.” Finally, Trip admits he just wants to go exploring. Archer refuses, reasoning that, “This ship’s a little young to be without its chief engineer.”
A short time later, Archer is recording a log entry and enjoying a cheesy snack. I find I prefer the Captain’s Log done as a scene rather than a voiceover. We get to see a little bit of what Archer’s thinking that doesn’t make it into the final report. Also, Porthos the beagle is cute running back and forth on the bed as Archer paces. He’s complaining about T’Pol taking all the fun out of being a space captain. On the other hand, “She’s right. Whoever’s on that ship might not want us nosing around.” I’m happy to see that, despite what he thinks of her personally, or how much “Yay Humans!” bravado he exhibits around her, he is still able to recognize the good points T’Pol makes. Not that he’s going to let her stop him from visiting the other ship. It’s just good that he considered and rejected his first officer’s recommendation rather than rejecting it out of hand.
This week, the log entry is interrupted by a chime at the door. It’s Hoshi, who has come to try to get out of going on the field trip. She suggests that she stay on the Enterprise and telecommute through someone else’s communicator, giving her better access to her linguistic database. Archer explains he “would rather wait a few seconds if it means having you on site,” in case the technical stuff doesn’t work right. He doesn’t understand why she doesn’t want to go, and can see there is something else bothering her. She finally spills. “The environmental suits. They make me a little claustrophobic.” “And you took a job on a spaceship.” “You talked me into it!” I love the way she delivers this line. I can’t adequately describe it. It’s sort of nervous, giggly, and frustrated all in one. Archer refuses to let Hoshi out of the mission on those grounds. But there still seems to be something else on her mind. Archer sees it, too. I think she’s in love. When he asks her about it, she says it’s nothing and tries to hurry out of the room. He stops her and says he’ll walk with her to the shuttle bay.
Archer, Reed, and Hoshi are suiting up for their mission. Reed has pulled out every man-portable weapon in the gun locker to take along. “Going to war, Lieutenant?” Archer asks, and then restricts the weapon loadout to one phase pistol each. Reed is disappointed. Archer shows Hoshi the basics of a phase pistol, then slaps one onto her hip, where it sticks. If Hoshi doesn’t have a crush on Archer, I think she has grounds for a sexual harassment suit.
The shuttle docks with the derelict ship, and the away team crowds into the access tunnel. Faced with a locked door with no obvious method of being opened, Reed’s first instinct is to blow it open. I like this guy. Archer stops him, and finds the secret latch mechanism instead. Archer apologizes to Reed for ruining his fun while Hoshi reports back to Enterprise. “We’ve got access. We’re boarding the vessel.” They climb up a ladder into the unlighted ship, and wind up standing on a deck with the hatch above their heads. Two things: at what point did they spin around on the ladder so as not to fall on their heads, and why is there still artificial gravity in an otherwise unpowered ship? Anyway, the first thing Archer sees is a series of blast marks on the walls in the light of his helmet lamps. They discover a small amount of power running through a wall conduit, and green blood splattered all over the walls, like a Vulcan exploded. Eventually, they find the one functioning mechanism on the ship, a huge, wall-mounted slushee machine pumping green liquid. Hoshi is the first one to spot the rows of dead aliens hanging from the ceiling with big straws sticking out of them, running into the slushee machine. In her own words, she “scream[s] like a twelve year old” and starts backing out of the room. Archer: “Hoshi, where are you going?” Hoshi: “I don’t think you need a translator!”
It’s time I admit it. I like Hoshi Sato. I like the way they write her not as a device for finding the clues to lead to the next plot point, but as a person who feels way out of her depth and isn’t afraid to panic at the first sign of trouble. She’s not a hero; she’s an English teacher. (No offense to all the English teachers I ever had.)
Back on Enterprise, the away team is standing in the decontamination chamber as Dr. Phlox announces with great disappointment that they are all uninfested. It is my sad duty to report that no one gets to oil the Vulcan this week. As they exit the chamber and meet up with T’Pol, Archer deduces that whoever strung up the aliens and hooked them to the slushee machine are draining the bodies of something. “My guess is, they’re coming back.” Without batting an eye (literally, she didn’t blink. I checked), T’Pol says, “We should leave,” her logic being that the mission was to provide assistance, and dead people need no help. Therefore, the mission is over. That doesn’t sit well with Archer. He thinks they should do something, even if he can’t think of what just now. T’Pol’s winning argument is, “If we remain here, your crew could be put in jeopardy.” Archer goes over to the wall comm and orders the ship to take off, but he isn’t happy about it.
In sickbay, Phlox tells Hoshi about his first mass casualty experience. It was, “Very disturbing. You have nothing to be ashamed of.” Hoshi is upset that she was the only one to scream at the sight of all the bodies. “I’m a translator. I didn’t come out here to see corpses hanging on hooks.” Ah, c’mon. Everyone loves corpses hanging on hooks! Phlox suggests, “Have you ever considered you might be happier back at the university?” Hoshi explains in great detail why she wants to be out among the stars, boiling down to, “[Archer] needs me here.” Phlox causes discourse whiplash by suddenly mentioning. “If she doesn’t take these nutrients I’m afraid she won’t survive.” He’s talking about the metaphor slug, of course. Hoshi considers asking Archer to stop off at a planet where she can drop off the slug to live out the rest of its sluggy life. “She needs to get back to an environment that is more suited to her.” Phlox responds, “Perhaps someplace where she can teach.” Bad Phlox! You’re not supposed to explicitly point out the workings of the metaphor slug. You’ll ruin everything, you fool!
Captain Archer, T’Pol, and Trip are eating together, pasta of some sort. Archer is distracted and depressed because he knows in his gut that leaving the dead guys to get fluid-sucked was the wrong thing to do. I don’t know what T’Pol’s problem is. Maybe she’s just a bad dinner conversationalist. At any rate, Trip is dominating the small talk, so it isn’t long until he starts asking what the aliens looked like. “They were crewmen, murdered on their own ship.” That pretty much kills the conversation. I guess if they were passengers Archer wouldn’t feel so bad about them. T’Pol suggests stopping to sightsee to get the crew’s mind off the dead guys they abandoned. Archer rants for a while, expressing remorse and guilt over not even trying to let anyone know those people were dead, no matter how difficult it would have been or how much danger the Enterprise would be risking just by being there. Meanwhile, T’Pol interjects with some of the most wooden line reading I’ve ever seen. Jolene! You’re Vulcan. You aren’t dead. The final result is that Archer orders the ship to reverse course back to the derelict.
As they return, Archer gives orders to the new away team and mission-critical people staying on the Enterprise. Phlox is going over to examine the bodies, find out who the aliens are, and figure out what is being done to them. Trip is going over to get the comm system up and running on the theory that it is the easiest way to contact their home planet. Hoshi is going back over to translate enough of the alien language to compose a distress call. Reed is to stay on the Enterprise and keep working on the torpedo targeting system so he can shoot the people who did this if they come back.
They arrive at the derelict and head over in the shuttle. In the meat locker, Phlox outlines to Archer how each of the aliens was killed. “This fellow hasn’t suffered as much cellular decay. He’s our best candidate for a post mortem. Care to assist?” On the bridge, Trip gets the computer running, which starts spewing alien lingo. It sounds like these aliens are from eastern Europe. Trip makes sure the transceiver is functional, and then hooks what might be a battery or a data collection box into the system. “Ship!” What did Hoshi just say? Oh, “ship”. Not what I heard the first time. My best guess is that the device she’s talking into listens to the alien language and somehow works out which words mean what when she says the human equivalent. Hey, kind of like a translator.
“Whoever did this is trying to collect triglobulin.” That is Phlox’s conclusion after examining the corpse he selected earlier. It turns out these aliens produce a chemical that is useful as a medicine, vaccine or aphrodisiac. Poor dopes. “It’s worth noting that triglobulin is very similar to human lymphatic fluid.” Poor us. I’ve got a funny feeling that fact will become important before the episode is over. Don’t ask me why.
Trip is loving the away mission. “I can’t get enough of this! An alien spaceship, sending a message off to who knows where.” Hoshi just wants to get it done and get back to the Enterprise as quickly as possible. She tells Trip, “I’m going to ask the captain to take me home.” She still hasn’t gotten over her reaction during the previous visit. She feels she’s not cut out to be a bold explorer. She does, however, manage to work out how to say, “Ship in distress,” in alienese. “Tuk tom dul gunat seela.” Maybe it’s Navaho.
T’Pol contacts Archer, telling him there is a ship incoming. “Its power signatures match the scans you took of the biopumps.” The bad guys have finally shown up. Archer orders everyone off the derelict. Then he shoots the slushee machine so that even if they lose, the bad guys don’t get what they were after. Good man.
T’Pol contacts the armory, where Reed is still working on the targeting scanners. “If you want me to hit a stationary dairy barn, then I could accommodate you, but not a moving vessel.” Despite this less than stellar progress report, T’Pol orders Reed to the bridge in five minutes.
Archer contacts T’Pol to have the Enterprise’s docking arm extended for the shuttle’s arrival. As the shuttle docks, the bad guys are not responding to T’Pol’s friendly greeting, but are coming ever closer. They fire on the Enterprise, blowing out one warp engine and knocking the shuttle off the docking arm. Seeing the weapon fire outside pummeling the Enterprise, Hoshi reaches over and closes the blind on her window. The shuttle reconnects and is pulled inside. The shuttle hatch is a hinged roof panel that meets up with a matching ladder to provide entry and exit to the vehicle. I like it. Nice and primitive. I do wonder why they don’t just go out the side door we saw last week. I would think it had something to do with pressurization and keeping the airlock cycle to a minimum, if going out the top made any difference at all as far as those things were concerned. Still, it’s got style. When Archer learns that the ship is unable to go to warp, he orders, “Have Malcolm arm the torpedoes!” No namby-pamby diplomacy for him.
The bad guys stop firing long enough for the away team to change clothes and get to their stations. They do not stop closing in, however. “Both forward tubes loaded and ready, sir,” Reed reports, giddy with anticipation. The first torpedo bounces off the other ship’s shields and explodes. Hey, they got shields! Unfair! They’re evil and they’re cheaters. I hope they lose. The second torpedo gets shot out of the sky by the other ship’s point defenses. I think the Enterprise is out of torpedo tubes. Reload, man! Archer contacts Trip to see if they can leave yet. “The entire nacelle’s been completely depolarized. I’m afraid we’re stuck here a while.” Or maybe not so long.
A sheet of energy pans through the ship. Phlox identifies it as, “a sub-molecular bioscan. We’ve all been probed.” That doesn’t sound so bad, Dr. Phlox. “They have, no doubt, discovered your lymphatic systems contain some useful compounds.” Oh, yeah. Uh oh. Archer orders Reed to the armory. “Start distributing hand weapons.” Already he’s better at defending the ship than Picard ever was.
Just then, Mayweather spots another ship arriving on the scene. Reed decides to ignore the order he was just given and returns to his station. Good news! The ship belongs to the same people as the derelict. Bad news! No one understands a word he’s saying. Archer tells Hoshi to explain the situation, so she types the words into her translator, which then appear on the alien ship, perfectly translated. The day is saved! No, wait, not even the people on the show are buying that one. Hoshi is confident that she screwed it up. “This isn’t Spanish we’re dealing with here. I’d be lucky if I’m getting half the vocabulary right.”
Meanwhile, the bad guy ship grabs the Enterprise in “a stabilizing beam,” which I suppose is like a tractor beam except is doesn’t pull things closer. It does do a number on ship’s systems, though. Everything breaks. I’ve just made a bet with myself that I can use that phrase in every one of these I write. The alien on the viewscreen has finished puzzling out what Hoshi sent, and now believes that the Enterprise killed the crew of the derelict. They try to explain, everyone shouting suggestions at Hoshi, but the translator program doesn’t have enough of a grasp on the language to get their meaning across. Hoshi herself is doing slightly better, understanding some of what the alien is saying before the translator decodes it, and correcting some of its mistakes.
Archer has an idea. “Tell them to run scans on the biopumps that are hooked up to the corpses.” If the Enterprise could tell who the bad guys were with that method, it stands to reason the other aliens could do the same. Meanwhile, the bad guys extend what are probably boarding tubes from the bottom of their ship, latching onto the Enterprise. There goes the paintjob. Hoshi can’t get the machine to string together the right words to make the alien captain understand, so Archer orders her, “Do it yourself. Talk to him.” She claims she hasn’t picked up enough of the basics to say anything intelligible. It isn’t so much that she can’t do it as that she is deathly afraid of doing it wrong and getting everyone killed and hooked up to alien slushee machines. As the bad guys start drilling into the hull, Archer takes Hoshi by both shoulders and tells her, “I need you to do this. We all do. That’s why you’re here.”
Emboldened by the touch of his hand and his soothing words, Hoshi steps forward into view. Slowly, haltingly, she starts. The alien captain, glad to be speaking to a sentient at last, seems willing to be more patient. Speaking loud and slow, because everyone understands you if you speak loud and slow, ask any American tourist, she repeats her greeting, then launches into a spiel that would impress any Dadaist poet. She apparently explains the situation, because the other ship breaks off and starts attacking the ship that is currently trying to mount the Enterprise. They give the Enterprise a chance to move away, and then blow the bad guys to kingdom come. Reed gets a chance to fire a token torpedo, using the targeting scanners he managed to finally get aligned in all that free time he had during the attack and Hoshi’s Life Lesson.
After the battle, repairs, incidents, allegations, embarrassments, and recriminations, Archer detours the ship to a planet where Hoshi and Phlox land to release the metaphor slug. They put the poor thing on a rock in the middle of a desert. She explains (to, I feel I must remind you, an alien slug) that while this not its own planet, it’s close, and, “It’s not that hard to adapt. You’re gonna do just fine here.” Message for you, sir!
Next week, the Slugmen of Omicron Theta 4 hunt down the Enterprise and demand the return of their emperor.