In this week’s thrilling episode:

SEE! Mayweather play in the snow!

SEE! T’Pol get mail!

SEE! a visiting Vulcan refuse a meal!

The episode opens, big surprise, in the galley of the Enterprise, where Trip is showing Phlox a series of drawings sent by Trip’s nephew’s fourth grade class depicting the Enterprise, aliens, and whatnot. Phlox spots T’Pol walking past and, as part of his ongoing campaign to drive her mad, calls to her. She trundles over, and, looking at one drawing, remarks, “This rendering is crude, yet surprisingly accurate.” She is made to pay for her feigned interest by Trip, who offers her a crudely rendered depiction of either a seasick Vulcan or some sort of half-elf, half-ogre. She is saved from having to come up with a logical reason to go “Ew!” when the ship drops out of warp. Archer’s voice comes over the ship’s public address system. “For those of you who aren’t near a window, you might want to find one. There’s something pretty amazing off starboard.” Then, instead of following anyone to the window to look out, the scene switches to the bridge, where there is a comet trailing across the main viewscreen. Reed, having checked the borrowed Vulcan star charts, whose completeness and accuracy have been questioned previously, by me if not the characters, tells Archer that the comet isn’t listed. “That means we discovered it,” Hoshi points out, justifying her paycheck for the week. Feeling proud of himself, Archer orders Mayweather to fly closer to the comet while the credits roll.

Trip and T’Pol finish migrating to the bridge as the program returns. Trip gawks at the pretty picture on the TeeVee while T’Pol squeezes in a little scientific investigation. The comet is about 83 kilometers across, which is about 52 miles for those of us still holding out from switching to the metric system. “I always wanted to chase a comet. Maybe we should spend a few days following this one,” Archer decides. Being a starship captain is easy. Just do whatever the hell you feel like and make it sound good in the reports. Hearing Archer’s plan, T’Pol objects on account of comets not being all that interesting. Archer’s counter-argument is that this one is rilly big, so there.

Disgusted, T’Pol leaves the bridge and goes to her quarters, massaging her stiff neck. I’m sure Trip would help her massage her other stiff parts, if she would reciprocate. She sits at her desk and checks her email. She has a message, written in vertical Vulcan so we can’t read it. But, you can just tell by the look on her face that…well…um…that her eyes are open. She doesn’t blink, so it must be serious.

Once more in the galley, Trip snags himself a big honkin’ slice o’ pecan pie from the automat just as T’Pol enters, carrying a book. “I came for tea,” she explains when Trip calls her on it. She orders hot green tea because, “Caffeine has little effect on Vulcan physiology.” Trip offers the other seat at his table to her, which she accepts for no reason I can discern except to prolong the scene. Trip rambles to her about what a rotten day he had. “Then somebody told me Chef made a pecan pie, and my life brightened,” Trip drawls. Throughout the incredible lack of anything substantive occurring in this episode, several mentions are made of the ship’s cook. In every single instance, they refer to him simply as “Chef.” I can’t help but think that in the kitchen there is a fat, black, singing Scientologist with a red shirt dispensing advice to Ensigns Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman, and making sweet love down by the warp core with every female crew member. Trip offers some pie to T’Pol. She refuses. “It’s mostly sugar.” Trip waxes philosophic, “It may not be good for the body, but it’s good for the soul.” He really enjoys that pie. Finally, he notices that T’Pol isn’t actually listening to him, but is instead reading something. He asks her if anything is wrong. “I’m fine, Commander,” she tells him. We know she’s not, because the last scene was suspicious, but Trip has no reason to doubt her, yet. T’Pol excuses herself and leaves, taking her glass of tea with her. I wonder if the ship has a guy whose sole job is to run around collecting everyone’s dirty dishes.

Later, in the situation room, T’Pol tells the captain that the comet is full of “Eisilium,” pronounced “I-silly-am,” a mineral they made up. “It’s an extremely rare mineral,” she explains. So rare that the Vulcans have never had enough to study. Thus, it has no value except as a curiosity. So, Archer decides to expend ship’s resources and time to collect some. The deposits are too deep for the transporter to work. Reed suggests, “We’ve got the portable drilling rig, sir.” Mayweather adds, “The comet’s certainly big enough to land on.” Following the ancient tradition, “You thought of it; you do it,” Archer assigns Reed and Mayweather to take the trip and get the rocks.

At the front of the bridge, Hoshi’s sensors spot something. “I’m detecting a vessel closing on our position,” she informs Archer. “It’s Vulcan.” Archer orders them hailed. Cool ship design, by the way. It’s a ring with a sort of wedge stuck through it. The Vulcan captain, who looks like he’s been dead for a week, acts snotty. “You’re a long way from Earth, Captain. Are you lost?” Archer tells him they’re having a look at this comet, and is surprised to hear the Vulcans are also interested. “My science officer tells me that Vulcans aren’t very interested in comets.” The Vulcan, Captain Vannik, elaborates, “Actually, it’s your interest in the comet we’re investigating.” Archer, his own attitude starting to exude a bit of mucus, tells Vannik about the drilling team and offers to let the Vulcans join. “If you have no objection, we’d like to remain here and observe.” Archer agrees, and communication ends. Irked, Archer calls T’Pol into his ready room.

“I’d love to know what they’re really doing here,” Archer tells T’Pol once they’re alone. T’Pol suggests they just happened by as they claimed, but Archer doesn’t buy it. “This isn’t the first time we’ve caught them lurking around,” Archer reminds her and tells us. “I’m starting to get the feeling they’re looking over our shoulder a little too often.” T’Pol doubts there is anything amiss afoot. Archer takes the bold step of deciding, “If Vannik is the kind of guy who likes to watch, let him.”

The shuttle pod launches and heads for the comet. Inside, putting on his space suit, Reed reflects, “I’ve never stood on a comet before.” Mayweather asks, “Has anyone?” “Good question.” Because this will be Mayweather’s third time ever to see a snowy landscape, the two decide they need to commemorate the occasion, but can’t decide how just yet. I know! Why don’t you foolishly endanger yourselves so that you need to be rescued by the end of the show? They find a nice spot to land next to the gravestones of previous explorers of this comet. They get out and look around, wearing their 2001-surplus space suits.

In Engineering, Hoshi arrives at Trip’s beckoning. “I found some kind of power surge in the transceiver array,” he explains. She diagnoses it instantly. “It looks like an encrypted transmission.” She pushes some buttons and determines, “It came from the Vulcan ship.” Trip asks, “Who was it sent to?” How many guesses do you want?

Trip goes to the captain with the news. Archer is more disappointed than anything. “We had an agreement. She promised not to speak to the Vulcans without telling me.” Trip is not surprised T’Pol broke her promise. He asks if Archer wants Hoshi to decrypt the message. “Tell her it’s top priority,” Archer orders wearily.

A short time later, Archer is on the bridge with Trip, Hoshi, and Dr. Phlox. The mood is very serious. Obviously, something vital is in the works. Oh, I can’t go on. Archer is recording a message to send back to Trip’s nephew’s fourth grade class, wherein he answers the kids’ questions. It’s a very long scene that answers many insignificant questions and chews up several minutes of airtime. I don’t have the patience to outline the whole scene, so let me sum up. What do you eat? Food, grown in hydroponic gardens, and also re-sequenced protein. Do you date? We can, but it’s kinda cramped. How do you talk to aliens? The universal translator and Hoshi’s language skills. When you flush, where does it go? It gets recycled into boxes and shoes. Trip is forced to answer this question, and he isn’t happy about it. People who know me personally can understand my sympathy for Trip at this moment. Can germs live in space? Short answer, yes. Long answer, the hundred-word essay Dr. Phlox recites, which boils down to, yes. Once the recording is finished, Archer worries about how well it came out, as well he should.

On the comet, while Reed scans things in preparation for setting explosive charges, Mayweather builds a model of Devil’s Tower, Wyoming out of snow. He saw the movie and is hoping to get abducted off the show so he can meet Richard Dreyfus. Reed takes a plasma torch and burns a couple of eyes and a smiley mouth onto the top part of the snow sculpture, because it would be too simple to do it with his finger. He then jabs the torch into the snowman’s head as a nose, making a distinctly Styrofoam-crunching noise as it enters. Just then, Archer calls Reed from the ship to check in. Moving to the ship’s bridge, we see an overhead shot of the fearless comet explorers on the viewscreen. Busted! “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you we’re being observed,” Archer reminds them. Realizing they’ve been caught, Reed promises, “It won’t be there long, sir.”

Hoshi shows up in Engineering with the decrypted message T’Pol received. “It’s in Vulcan. You’ll have to run it through the translation matrix,” she tells Trip as she hands over the disk. Trip asks if she read it. “I didn’t feel it’d be right,” she explains before wandering off. Trip puts the disk in his desktop computer and translates it. He sighs at what he sees.

Archer is fiddling with some files in his ready room. He hurries to close the cabinet door as Trip enters. “Well, we decrypted the message.” Trip explains that it was a letter, a personal message and not anything espionage-related. “Very personal,” Trip emphasizes. They both feel rotten for violating T’Pol’s privacy. “All they had to do was send it through regular channels, mark it ‘Personal,’ and we’d’ve left it alone,” Trip exposits. Trip is particularly upset that, by trying to hide the message, the Vulcans forced him to find out what it said. “I gotta tell her,” Trip decides. Archer doesn’t think that’s such a hot idea, but doesn’t stop him. “You might want to take a phase pistol with you,” Archer offers.

Trip interrupts T’Pol and Crewman Jarhead as they work on the bridge. Jarhead leaves, and Trip beats around the bush until T’Pol tells him to get to “Your point, Commander.” Trip tells her he read her letter and asks why it wasn’t sent through channels. “That takes time. The letter was important.” She then offers, “I have more letters in my quarters. Would you like to read those as well?” Getting kind of snippy, there, ain’t ya? She asks him, “Has anyone else read the letter?” He tells her no. “Good, then I’ll only have to kill you.” She didn’t say that, but she was thinking it. I can tell. Instead, she makes him promise to continue not telling anyone. Then, she goes to answer a summons from Archer.

Archer tells T’Pol he has decided to invite Captain Vannik over from the Vulcan ship. “If he’s so interested in how we do things, he might as well come see for himself. Once he realizes we’re not going to blow up the galaxy, maybe he’ll leave us alone.” I doubt both the premise and the conclusion. T’Pol thinks Archer has had a good idea for once. Archer asks her to give Chef some Vulcan recipes. If he’d done that when she first came aboard, maybe T’Pol wouldn’t be so snippy now. “A little food, a little wine,” Archer thinks will warm human-Vulcan relations right up. “Vulcans don’t drink...wine,” T’Pol reminds Archer. He’s unmoved by her Bela Lugosi impression.

We now find T’Pol in sickbay, getting her neck examined by Dr. Phlox. She’s had a headache and hasn’t slept for two days. Maybe it’s all that caffeine she’s been guzzling. “Is something on your mind?” Phlox asks her. “You know anything said between us is strictly confidential.” She doesn’t want to talk about it. Phlox suggests that if there is anyone she feels she can talk to, she should do so just to get it off her chest. It’s crowded enough there as it is. Meanwhile, she gets an aspirin in the neck.

On the comet, the snowman has evolved into a giant troll with pointy ears higher than the top of its head. Reed casually puts something on the ground at its base, probably an explosive. Reed contacts the ship. “Charges are set.” Archer tells Hoshi, “Inform the Vulcans we’re about to make a very loud noise,” then orders Reed to “Blast away.” Reed and Mayweather hide behind an ice pillar. Reed pushes the button, causing what was undoubtedly a disappointing explosion. “Where’s the kaboom? There’s supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!”

Reed and Mayweather survey their destruction. “I was hoping for a bit more symmetry,” Reed grumbles. Mayweather walks off to get a drill while Reed climbs down into the crater. It’s a hard climb considering the local gravity should be negligible. Maybe this rare mineral is super-dense, causing Earth-like gravity on such a small rock.

Meanwhile, on the ship, guess who’s come to dinner? Archer, Trip, T’Pol, and Cap’n Vannik are in the Captain’s mess. Archer is trying painfully hard to make small talk with the visitor, who is answering Archer’s questions but not elaborating at all. It hurts to watch. Archer discusses how much he enjoyed a mission on a Vulcan ship once and how great Vulcan EVA suits are. Vannik tells Archer, “You are easily impressed.” Vannik is not eating. Archer asks him why, his diplomatic veneer wearing thin. “I have already eaten,” Vannik reveals, and I’m ready to shoot this guy out a torpedo tube. Archer offers Vannik a tour of the ship. He refuses. Archer offers him iced tea. He refuses. Archer offers to pull the yardstick out of his ass. Not really. Instead, he briefly rants about the ubiquity of Vulcans. “For a people who claim not to be explorers you sure do get around.” Vannik acts as if he doesn’t know what Archer means. “It’s good to know that no matter how big the universe is, there’s always a Vulcan ship nearby.” Trip tries to defuse things with more small talk. T’Pol has to explain the concept. “On Earth, it’s customary to exchange personal information with someone you’ve just met.” Vannik rattles off a couple details. Archer, having just barely regained his composure, offers to answer any questions Vannik might have. “I have none. Humans have never held much interest for me.” Well, that tears it. Archer all but opens the window to throw Vannik out manually, pausing only to ask, “How long do you plan on spying on us?” “If we were spying, Captain, you never would have detected our presence.” As Vannik is being escorted out of the room and off the ship, he pauses to say something in Vulcan to T’Pol. Trip asks her what he said, but she won’t translate.

As Archer sulks onto the bridge, Hoshi calls him over to look at a meaningless graphic of the comet. On the comet, drilling to collect the core sample is proceeding apace. Archer calls with bad news. “The comet’s rotational axis shifted when you set off those charges. In about two hours, the shuttle pod will be facing the star.” Things will melt around it, which would be bad. In other words, there’s a deadline. “We’ll be done with time to spare,” Reed assures Archer.

T’Pol is in her room, meditating, when the door chimes. Trip enters, and T’Pol asks him to sit, on the floor pretty much. T’Pol explains why she called him here. “Doctor Phlox believes that it might help if I was to discuss my problem with someone I felt comfortable confiding in.” Trip is surprised she picked him. She explains that the only reason for her choice was to keep the number of people aware of her problem to a minimum. It seems T’Pol must make a choice. “Unless I leave Enterprise immediately, my wedding plans will be cancelled.” When T’Pol joined the Enterprise crew, she asked the parents of her betrothed to delay the wedding. This upset them enough that they sent her the mystery letter, saying come now or never. Trip offers some suggestions, but T’Pol shoots each one down with some detail of the Vulcan arranged marriage tradition that she neglected to mention the first time around. Running out of ideas, Trip finally asks her, “What do you want to do?” This leads to a retread of the Needs of the Many vs. the Needs of the Few argument, personal choice vs. social obligation, and so on. “People change!” “Vulcans don’t. My obligation is to my culture, my heritage. It has to take precedence.” “Sounds to me like you already made up your mind. Why did you ask me here?” You fool! Can’t you see that she loves you?

Reed and Mayweather are packing up to get off the comet. As Mayweather climbs out of the crater where they were drilling, he slips and falls in the freakishly high gravity, twisting his knee. Reed helps him up. “Let’s get you to the pod. I’ll come back for the gear if there’s time.” Man’s got his priorities straight. Mayweather insists, “At least take the core sample. We shouldn’t go back to the ship empty-handed.” Reed won’t be empty-handed. He’ll be carrying a klutzy helmsman. Reed agrees to Mayweather’s condition. They limp across the ice, walking toward the threatening sun. Under their feet, the ice begins to crack around them.

Reed and Mayweather continue to hurry along as best they can, three-legging it over the collapsing tundra. I have to believe Reed at least considered ditching Mayweather and claiming it was an accident later. They reach the pod, and after the collapsing-ice equivalent of a cat jumping out of the shadows in a horror movie, they clamber in. Lucky they remembered the keys. Mayweather starts up the engines, melting the ice around them and plummeting the shuttle into an icy crevasse. We know from “Terra Nova” that shuttles can’t lift straight up, so they’re doomed. Mayweather blames himself for the fall, and rightly so.

The Enterprise noticed the fall, and contacts the shuttle to make sure no one died yet. Archer orders, “Bring the grappler on line.” If you recall, the grappler is a dual action harpoon gun with magnetic grabby things on the ends that Enterprise uses because humanity hasn’t invented the tractor beam yet. Because the shuttle is at the bottom of a deep hole, Trip has to bullseye the hole to have a chance at snaring the shuttle. Archer takes over the helm and carefully positions the ship as Trip directs. The Vulcan ship calls, offering assistance. “Tell him we’ve got everything under control,” Archer growls through clenched teeth. The ship moves into position, and the grapplers fire! One misses, but the other hits right on the roof, shaking and startling the occupants. “One’ll be fine,” Archer hopes when he hears the news. Trip begins reeling the shuttle in, but “The pod’s hit an outcropping. It’s wedged in.” Archer tries to maneuver the ship to yank it loose, but the grappler magnet fails due to the Plotdevicium in the comet, dropping the shuttle even deeper into the hole. To make things worse, T’Pol reports, “They’re moving out of the sunlight. The surface ice is re-crystallizing.” Trip picks up his cue. “In less than an hour, that cavern will be sealed up again.” Archer’s brilliant plan is to work faster, not harder. T’Pol has an alternative suggestion: the Vulcan ship. “His ship has a tractor beam.” Archer resists the idea, because he doesn’t want to ask Vulcans for help if human stick-to-it-iveness can get the job done. I wonder how the imperiled pair would vote. T’Pol deduces that it is time to be emphatic. “Vannik offered to assist us. There’s no shame in accepting.” Trip agrees with her. “I don’t like ‘em any more than you do, Cap’n, but a tractor beam sounds pretty good right now.” T’Pol uses Archer’s prejudice against him. “Vannik expects you to refuse his offer. He sees humans as arrogant, prideful.” Mr. Kettle, there’s a call for you from a Mr. Pot. “Why not prove him wrong? You can save them, or you can let your pride stand in the way. You’re human. You’re free to choose.” See how it all ties together? T’Pol’s big decision, Archer’s big decision, both colored by their cultural biases, both having to turn against those biases to make the “right” decision. Man, them writers is clever.

The two in the shuttle hear a funny woogawooga noise as the shuttle shakes slightly and begins to lift. Reed answers the incoming call and is surprised to hear, “This is Captain Vannik of the Vulcan ship T*cough*. Stand by to ignite your engines and return to your ship.” Outside, we see the shuttle in the grip of a tractor beam.

After the rescue, Archer and the gang are on the bridge. Archer is talking to Vannik via the videophone. “I thought you might want to take a look at the data we’ve collected. You helped us bring it back.” He refuses. Trip asks to see the technical specs for the tractor beam. He refuses. At least he’s consistent. Archer can’t let him go without giving a little attitude first. “You’ve done more than enough. See you around.” Trip steps over to T’Pol and asks her if she’s packed to leave for her Vulcan nuptials yet. As a sort-of response, she asks Archer, “With your permission, I’d like to transmit a message to the T*a-choo* to send to Vulcan.” She glares at Trip defiantly, and he smirks. She leaves the bridge to compose the message.

In her room, T’Pol sits in her mediation pose, contemplating a piece of pecan pie. Does it signify her newfound appreciation of human individuality, a new willingness to adapt to her human circumstances, or a connection of a more personal nature with Chief Engineer Tucker? Or has she always secretly liked pie? Hmm....