We open to find Mayweather at his post on the Enterprise bridge, surfing the Internet instead of steering the ship. Hoshi is looking over his shoulder, so, instead of porn, he’s looking at heaping piles of data about a lost human colony called Terra Nova. Archer saunters onto the bridge. “Are we there yet?” he asks. What, is he four? Mayweather is amazed at the volume of information amassed. Gee, it’s almost like the trip was documented or something. Hoshi wonders if any of the colonists are still alive. “I’ll let you know, in about three hours,” Archer replies.
Archer, T’Pol, and Trip are in the captain’s mess trying to swallow a huge load of exposition. Under the pretense of telling T’Pol about early human colonization, they lay out the backstory for us. Here’s the gist. Eighty-five or so years ago, having colonized all the good spots in the home solar system, humanity decided to launch its first extra-solar colony ship, to the only habitable planet they’d found within twenty light-years of Earth. It took nine years to get there. After five years on the ground, the colony learned that Earth was going to send another boatload of deportees, that is, colonists. The colony wanted neither the extra mouths to feed nor the genetic diversity. Angry transmissions were traded until one day the colony on Bossa Nova stopped talking. This so spooked the guys back on Earth that they not only didn’t send the new colony ship like they planned, but also never sent any ship to find out what happened. They also never asked the Vulcans to look into it for them because humans are prideful dinks. Thus, potentially due to the breakdown of a six-dollar transmitter coil, humanity gave up on its first ever settlement and sat on their thumbs for the next seventy years. Until this episode. Hearing the story, T’Pol reasons, “Terra Nova may still be there, Captain.” Y’think?
They arrive, and Archer has the ship go into orbit. Archer hails the colony, Hoshi remembering to push the Talk button about halfway through. “Terra Nova colony: This is Captain Jonathan Archer of the starship Enterprise. We’ve come from Earth. Please respond.” When no one answers, Archer asks T’Pol if there are any life signs on the planet. Me, I would’ve done that first. She finds no life signs, but the colony buildings are still intact. She also notices a low level of radiation in the area. Viewing it on the big screen, they see a dozen oddly shaped buildings. Archer asks how bad the radiation is. T’Pol tells him, “A few hours of exposure shouldn’t pose a risk.” You weren’t planning on having any children, right? Archer gives Trip command of the ship and drags Reed, T’Pol, and Mayweather to their dooms. The spider is caught in her own web.
The shuttle lands next to an assortment of prefab buildings, and the away team rushes in, scanners blazing. They kind of mosey, actually. Reed discovers a bicycle. Mayweather, a welcome mat. I guess synthetic rubber really isn’t biodegradable. T’Pol locates no seventy year old, weathered, washed out weapons fire residue. “Whatever happened, I gotta believe they tried to let Earth know about it,” Archer figures. He orders Mayweather to find the communications shack and, “See if the data buffer’s intact. We might be able to access their last transmission logs.” My VCR forgets its channels if I unplug it for 20 seconds, and some frontier ham radio is going to hold its data for a lifetime? Granted, it’s a ham radio OF THE FUTURE! but it still seems to be fetched from the middle distance at least. After Archer sends Reed to “check the perimeter,” T’Pol tells Archer that, “seventy years ago radiation levels would have been lethal.” Did someone nuke humanity’s first colony? Was it Earth, secretly trying to deal with unruly settlers? Archer wonders where the bleached bones of the settlers went. T’Pol suggests they left the planet before the radiation killed them. “That would have been kind of difficult,” Archer quips. Pointing to the buildings around him, he explains that the colonists’ ship was dismantled and used to build the structures. “It was a one-way trip.”
Walking the perimeter, Reed spots a figure skulking through the trees. After checking to make sure there are no hallucinogenic flowers about, he informs the captain. “We’re not alone, sir. There’s someone in the forest.” Everyone comes a-running toward the danger.
Reed chases the grey-faced beast-man over hill and dale, and a couple of felled trees, eventually coming to a cave entrance. Archer and T’Pol conveniently show up from a completely different direction. As they poke their heads into the cave, Reed gives a description. “Appears to be a couple of meters tall, biped, odd looking scales.” T’Pol’s scanner tells her there are hundreds of meters of caves. Couldn’t they leave her home and just bring her scanner? Archer calls Mayweather, whom they left alone and unprotected in the colony, and tells him bring over some flashlights. They paid a lot of money for that cave set, and, by god, they’re gonna use it every chance they get.
They go snooping into the caveman’s lair, and immediately come to a dead end. Then they spot the crawl-hole near the floor, I mean ground. As Archer crouches to stick his head into the lion’s mouth, Reed does his job as security guy. “It’s best if I go first, sir.” I am wearing the red stripe. Archer sees the wisdom of it and lets Reed go first, following soon after. They poke around with no apparent goal, spotting a space armadillo digging through a rock wall, which, out of nervousness, they both almost shoot. Meanwhile, T’Pol and Mayweather are being all tense and guardlike outside the cave.
The invasion of the cave goes smoothly, at first. They find a chamber with a combination of stone-age bone tools and modern-era cast iron pots and pans. Archer finds a folding pocketknife. Reed finds a bunch of grayish-blue faces staring down at them from a rock shelf near the ceiling. Archer tries to talk to them. “My name is Archer. We’re looking for some people. I was hoping you could help us.” How many years did he go to diplomacy school to learn to be that smooth? “We’re not going to hurt you,” Archer promises. One of the cave people comes into view pointing a gun. Reed stuns him. So much for diplomacy. Other cave people run in and start shooting their machine pistols at them, firing primitive projectiles that transfer energy in the form of momentum, i.e. bullets. Archer and Reed scram. And quickly get lost. T’Pol calls Archer, having heard the gunfire, and uses her scanner to guide her spelunking superior toward the cave mouth. “In approximately three meters, a tunnel will branch off to your left.” “I don’t see a tunnel.” “Correction: ten meters.” Great, she’s got the thing set for the wrong units again. She thought she was reading in feet and was doing conversions in her head. They get to the cave mouth, and Archer leaps through the ground-level hole to safety. Reed gets shot in the leg and falls over. Before Archer realizes it, a cave guy jumps on Reed and drags him away. Archer turns back to see what happened, but gets fired on as he tries to crawl back in.
Outside, one of the cave people jumps out of the cave onto Mayweather. They struggle until T’Pol shoots him in the back. Not Mayweather, the other guy. Archer comes running out of the cave right behind, bullets ricocheting after him. If there was a cave guy between Archer and the exit, why did he run out to attack instead of pinning down Archer inside the cave? Look! Over there! A distracting thing! T’Pol scans the cave guy, and then they all book for the shuttle. As they prepare for liftoff, Mayweather observes, “If those aliens killed the colonists, they could kill Malcolm [Reed], too.” T’Pol begs to differ. “Those weren’t aliens. They’re human.” Dun dun DAAHHH!
Back on board, Archer’s pissed and Mayweather’s confused. Archer calls the bridge from the turbolift. “What have you found?” A good map of the cave system, that’s what. There are 52 human biosigns wandering around in there, but the ship’s sensors are able to identify the British one. Archer orders Phlox to the situation room, then starts wondering if this was his fault. “They’re never seen other humans before. Maybe we looked as strange to them as they did to us.”
The entire main cast except Reed (who says they have bad continuity?) is gathered around the display table in the situation room, a.k.a. an alcove in the back of the bridge. I still wonder why they don’t put this kind of thing up on the main viewscreen. T’Pol supposes that the colonists were driven underground by the radiation. The cause of the radiation is still unknown. Phlox thinks they’ve lived on mushrooms and bugs all this time. Thanks, but if you think you still need to justify the premise at this point in the game, maybe you shouldn’t have gone this way in the first place. Mayweather suggests using the transporter to nab Reed, who is under guard, but, according to Trip, there’s too much rock in the way. At least they remembered to consider it. T’Pol suggests somehow getting into a nearby collapsed tunnel, and phasering their way out to get close to Reed. Trip suggests using a stun grenade to take out the guards. Archer is against the whole notion. “We’ve got to find some way to talk to them.” “They didn’t seem too eager to talk,” Mayweather points out. “If I can’t make first contact with other humans, I don’t have any business being out here.” Where did that come from? Archer’s had crewmen captured by hostile forces on alien worlds before. Every episode involving a planet, in fact. He’s never wigged out like this before. He orders Phlox to come with him, T’Pol to discover what caused the radiation, and Hoshi and Mayweather to get something useful out of the colony’s comm system.
Archer and Phlox go down to the planet and walk through the woods looking to get captured. Archer holds up his hands and shouts at the trees, “I’m unarmed!” Phlox also holds up his hands, looking like he doesn’t quite understand why. Very, very dirty people come out of the woods holding guns and grant Archer his wish. They drag them back to the cave.
They are led to the chamber with Reed, and Archer goes over to check on him. “I’ve lost a bit of blood, sir, but I don’t think it’s too serious.” Two new people walk into the scene, one a tall bald man who looks like he had a spill while chugging his woad, and a little old woman who had a similar experience with mustard. He identifies Archer as a human, but can’t place Phlox. “I am a Denobulan. I’m Captain Archer’s physician.” He asks Archer if he came from Earth. When Archer confirms it, he gets in Archer’s face. I imagine the stench to be quite powerful. “[You came] to do what? Gut the rest of us?” These folks have an odd vocabulary, no doubt derived from their primitive, underground experiences. I wonder what Hoshi’s translator would do with it. Archer explains he is there to help. “Novans have had enough ‘help’ from you,” spouts a yellowish extra. Despite the animosity, the Novans (actually confused humans, just so we’re all clear) give Archer permission to take Reed and skedaddle. Phlox is allowed his medical equipment to aid in the skedaddlation process by fixing Reed’s leg. While the patching commences, Archer can’t keep his mouth shut. “What makes you think we’re here to hurt you?” “Humans hurt Novans.” Well, that explains it. The old lady with mustard on her chin elaborates. “Poison rain. I was no taller than a digger, but I can still see back. We lived on the Overside. Then the humans dropped the poison, burned our skin, gutted the grown ones. There was no place to go but here.” Let me translate: When she was a kid, she lived above ground. Humans dropped a radioactive substance that caused burns and killed all the grups, I mean adults. They had to move into the caves to survive. The woman is silenced by an internal disturbance of some sort. Archer denies that humans had anything to do with irradiating the surface. Phlox declares Reed ready to move. Archer tells the Novans that they are an offshoot of humanity. “I don’t know what happened, but maybe we can work together and find out.” The Novans don’t believe it. “He speaks in shale!” While Archer continues to try to convince the Novans that he’s a good guy, Phlox surreptitiously scans the old woman. He tells the bald one with the blue chin, “Are you aware that your…mother, hmm?…is sick?” The Novans are shocked and frightened. “She has an illness that we call lung cancer. But, it’s easily cured.” Archer offers to take the old woman to the ship and cure her as a show of good faith. Blue-chin agrees, but only if he gets to go too. And if Reed stays as collateral. Reed is surprisingly calm about the whole thing.
On the shuttle, Archer tries to get the old woman, whom we’re eventually going to learn is named Nadette so I’m going to start calling her that now, to admit/remember she is human, but it’s not working. “My parents were Novans.”
They’ve reached sickbay and stuffed Nadette into the wall-mounted MRI. For a member of a cave-dwelling people, she’s awfully panicky inside the tube. Her son, Blue-Chin, claws on the tube door to try to dig her out. The door opens on its own and Nadette slides out. “My apologies for any discomfort,” Phlox apologizes. He looks at the results of the medical scan, and comes up with the cure. If only it were that easy. Archer uses the time Phlox needs to mix the medicine to show the Novans the pictures that Mayweather dug up in the first scene. “They might help you remember what it was like living on the Overside, before the poison rain.” Nadette seems confused, but Blue-Chin still thinks the human is lying to him. Archer tries to ram the truth down Blue-Chin’s throat. “Whether you want to believe it or not, we’re both human.” The Novans refuse to look at any more pictures.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, T’Pol discovers an impact crater 500 kilometers north of the colony site. T’pol exposits, “The [asteroid impact] would have created a radioactive cloud that probably covered the northern hemisphere for more than a year.” Trip is struck by the irony of it. “They spent all those years getting here, and for what?” Heavy, man.
Down on the planet, Reed tries to strike up a conversation with his guard by talking about his favorite subject: guns. When that goes nowhere, he asks to use the bathroom. I remind you that in England, this actor was a sitcom star. Reed hungrily eyes the unnamed food item his guard picks up and starts eating. “Is your belly hollow?” the guard asks. “It depends. What’s for dinner?” It’s space armadillo on the half shell. Reed is hungry enough to actually eat it. Throughout the caves, the Novans take to their primitive bone flutes and fill the space with breathy, tuneless Yanni music. I think they were shooting for a “cultured savage” moment.
On the ship, Hoshi and Mayweather have managed to get the last transmission out of the colony’s radio. Hoshi pops a disk into the captain’s stereo and hits Play. “No matter how angry Logan’s threats may have seemed, there had to have been a way of dealing with this other than attacking us. Nearly half the adults are dead, including Dr. Tracy, and everyone else is getting sick, except for the younger children.” He goes on, but those are the plot points. The colonists died thinking Earth bombed them, and that has colored the Novans’ view of humans ever since. The message never made it out of the atmosphere because of the debris from the impact. Phlox calls Archer down to sickbay. Last time this happened, one of his crewmen was pregnant, which was a hoot, so Archer hurries up to get down there in case it’s another amusing medical moment.
The good news is, Phlox has cured Nadette’s cancer. The bad news is, “Both she and her son are showing signs of micro-cellular decay in their endocrine systems.” Phlox guesses that their ground water has started poisoning them, and, even though he can cure cancer within hours, he can’t fix this. And it’s going to kill them. “Would bringing them to the surface help?” Nope. Phlox reports that T’Pol claims the surface will still be lethal for another decade. Archer tells Phlox, “Bring them to the situation room.”
In the situation room, the Novans refuse to leave. The planet, not the room. Archer reiterates, “It is not safe for you anymore.” He explains the asteroid theory, including this whopper regarding the radiation that killed most everybody. “When the asteroid hit, the fallout contained certain poisons. Humans under four or five can usually build up an immunity to them.” Yes, if I expose my nephew to hard gamma rays just a little bit every day, he’ll become immune to their effects. Just don’t get him angry or outraged. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. Those stubborn Novans still don’t buy that they are humans and think Archer wants to kill them. I wouldn’t blame him at this point. T’pol points out that, having just saved Nadette’s life, maybe the humans are owed the benefit of the doubt just this once. No go. Archer whips out a photo pulled from the archives of a Terra Cotta family. He asks Nadette, “Look familiar?” She recognizes, “the Overside before the poison rain,” but will only admit that the people in the photo are humans, rather than relatives. Archer asks her, “What were humans doing in your colony before it was destroyed?” Don’t have an answer for that one, do ya? Blue-Chin becomes concerned that Nadette is starting to fall for the human’s shale. Archer zooms the picture in on a mom and daughter. The girl is Bernadette Fuller. The mom is Vera. “You say this is me?” she exclaims, pointing at the image. Her son is trying to convince her to ignore what Archer is saying and go back home to the cave. Nadette doesn’t know what to think. Blue-Chin eventually wins. “If we’re not back by day your crewman will be gutted,” he reminds Archer. Frustrated, Archer agrees to get them back to their hole in the ground. Then he walks out, calling T’Pol after him.
In the captain’s quarters, he rattles off a synopsis of the episode so far, and T’Pol makes an eminently pragmatic suggestion. “Stun grenades.” She suggests beaming grenades into the caves, stunning the Novans, and hauling them up to the Enterprise in shuttles, not to mention in chains. Archer is shocked at the suggestion. “What do you think this is, a slave ship?” He tries to make sure T’Pol understands the goal. “We have to convince them that returning to Earth is the right thing. We can’t take them by force.” T’Pol points out Archer’s unspoken assumption. “Are you certain it is the right thing?” She asks him if he really thinks they could be assimilated back into human culture. “You’re damn straight! They’re human beings. It’s their birthright.” The attitude that spawned the Federation. T’Pol argues, “You can’t just pluck them up and bring them to a strange world and hope they’ll learn to conform.” Hey, I think she was kidding about the stun grenades. She claims that by saving the Novans’ lives, Archer would be destroying the Novan culture. Like colored mud on the chin and bone-flutes is such a great culture to preserve. It’s a good thing there’s not some all-encompassing regulation preventing Archer from doing what he thinks is most morally right on a situational basis by restricting his range of actions with respect to a primitive, effectively alien society. That’d be too much hassle. Archer calls Trip to come to him with his maps of the planet.
Studying Trip’s maps of fallout distribution and wind patterns, Archer realizes Terra Vista’s southern hemisphere was unaffected by the radiation that screwed everything up for the colony. Archer realizes, “There’s got to be similar underground topography on one of these southern continents. Caves, caverns….” Um, caves are caverns, Captain, sir. Archer heads off to escort the Novans back to their planet.
On the shuttle ride down, Archer makes his sales pitch for the move to the southern continents. Suspicion still abounds. “If our tunnels are infected, you wouldn’t want them so badly,” Blue-Chin concludes. Mayweather, piloting, explodes. “We don’t! We only want to help you.” Try to contain yourself, man. And don’t look away from where you’re going while performing re-entry, for your passengers’ sake if not your own. “You’re human. So am I,” Archer tries again. “Humans help each other.” The Novans have all the stubbornness of a people who have not yet reached the fourth act. Archer retreats to his fallback position. “Would you at least talk to your people, tell them what I propose?”
The shuttle lands just outside the abandoned colony. The sun is up, so Reed must be dead, right? As they touch down, the ground starts to shake, and the shuttle gets eaten up by a sinkhole. No one is hurt, but the shuttle is stuck eight meters underground. Blue-Chin starts to panic on account of being locked inside the shuttle. Archer checks with Trip to see if it is safe to go outside, and then tells him, “You’re going to have to build a rig to get this pod back on the surface.” Archer pushes open the side door and everyone piles out. They landed right next to a perfectly cubical boulder. “We’re in the downslope passage,” Blue-Chin notes, recognizing the area. “If you want to see your human alive, you’ll give me your pistol.” That came outta nowhere, but what the hey. Archer hands over his phase pistol, and orders Mayweather to stay behind with the shuttle.
Archer and the two Novans are wandering through badly-lit caves when they hear someone shouting. Nadette recognizes the voice. “It’s Akkarine!” (phonetic spelling) They rush off to find him. Which they do, at the bottom of a deep pit, pinned under a fallen, possibly petrified tree. Did I mention the pit is filling with water and the guy will drown soon? “Will you risk your life to save a Novan?” Blue-Chin asks Archer. Archer doesn’t think he can make the climb down the pit. Blue-Chin offers to lead the way. “We’ll track together, but you’ll need to trust me.” The contrivance fairy’s been a-visitin’, it looks like. Archer slips almost immediately after starting down the wall of the pit, and dangles precariously by one hand. What a cliffhanger! (I’m gonna hear about that one.) Blue-Chin holds out his hand and helps Archer back up onto the wall. They reach the bottom, and find the log far too heavy for them to lift. I could’ve told them that back at the top of the pit. The keep trying anyway, and the pinned Novan is in ever more danger of having his face washed for once in his life. “I need you to give me my phase pistol,” Archer says. Drowning is far too slow. “It’s your turn to trust me.” Ah, the old turnabout switcheroo. Gets ‘em every time. Blue-Chin hands over the gun. Archer sets it for “Slice ‘n’ Dice” and cuts through the log like a laser beam through a block of wood. He doesn’t pay much attention to what is on the far side of where he is cutting, so it is sheer coincidence that he doesn’t bisect the guy he’s rescuing. Archer and Blue-Chin are able to lift a section of the log far enough for the guy to slip out from underneath. I betcha they wrote this scene right after attending one of those trust-building management seminars.
Everyone makes it back to the Novans’ home cave, where Archer checks on Reed’s status. He’s not dead. I guess underground people measure sunrise differently from you and me. Archer asks after his health. “Not badly, all things considered, but I really wouldn’t mind getting this bullet out of my leg.” Insistently, Nadette orders Blue-Chin, “Tell them. Tell them what Archer said about the islands to the south.” Aw, mom. I don’ wanna. “I’ve seen back,” she explains, meaning, “I remembered.” Vera Fuller was my mother. That girl in the picture was me, a human girl.” Yay, breakthrough!
Everything must have worked out okay. The Enterprise is flying through space toward its next thrilling adventure. The people on board are eating. They must go through a good five, six meals a day. We see Archer, Trip, T’Pol, and special guest Mayweather wedged into a fourth seat between the table and the window in the captain’s mess. Mayweather is grilling T’Pol about other famous human missing persons cases she has no reason to know about. “And neither of those mysteries holds a candle to Terra Nova. And we solved it.” He’s positively giddy. Trip points out the side effect. “We didn’t just find them. We saved their lives.” Archer has an idea. “Tell you what, Travis. Why don’t you put together the report for Starfleet?” That’s what happens. You hang out with the boss in a social situation, and he winds up giving you an assignment. This is why I don’t go to the birthday lunches at my office.