"Theorizing that one could jump-start a flagging film career by returning to television, actor Scott Bakula stepped onto the set of the new series Enterprise and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped on UPN, facing a sci-fi fanbase that was not his own, and driven by the scriptwriters to change Star Trek history, for better or worse. His only guide on this journey is the audience, observers from his own time who appear in the form of ratings. And so, Mr. Bakula finds himself leaping from episode to episode, striving to put right what Berman and Braga put wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be back into feature films."

The episode starts with a shot of Gil Gerard as Buck Rogers, frozen in his space shuttle on the way to the 25th century. No, wait, my mistake. It's just a model being painted by our hero as a boy, with his father. As they work, they discuss the sociopolitical ramifications of Earth's relationship with the Vulcans and speculate on the impediments they may have placed in humanity's way, and the consequences and reasons for them. As a father and son are wont to do on a lazy Saturday. Meanwhile, young Mr. Archer selects a particularly unpleasant ochre pigment to paint the warp nacelles, and we learn that Daddy Archer has plans to build a starship which he can't (forgive me) seem to get off the ground.

Thirty years later, in a cornfield outside Smallville, Kansas, an alien spacecraft has crashed to Earth, containing a baby with powers and abilit--no, wrong again. My bad. It's actually Broken Bow, Oklahoma, and the Klingon now running through the corn away from the crash is fully grown. As two other aliens chase the Klingon, firing their (phasers? phase pistols? disruptors?) zap guns at him, Farmer Ted emerges from his prefab house (some things never change) and sees the smoke from the crash and the flash of weapons fire. Faced with mysterious goings-on on his property, Farmer Ted does what folks like him have been doing for hundreds of years: he goes back inside and gets his gun.

Meanwhile, the Klingon finds a grain silo-looking building and rushes into it, followed by two lumpy green guys in purple outfits. Discovering that the Klingon was so uncooperative as to lock the door behind him, one of the Lumpy Bad Guys gets down on the ground, becomes all squishy, oozes under the door, and unlocks it from the inside for the benefit of his less malleable companion. As they enter the ground level, the Klingon leaps out of a hatch higher up, runs far enough away that the entire special effect will be in the shot, and shoots the silo. Now, I don't know whether the building was full of grain dust, or they found Farmer Ted's secret 'shine stash, or Klingon hand weapons have a special "Blow Up Agricultural Structure" setting, but the silo blowed up real good, killing the Lumpy Squishy Green Bad Guys in Ugly Purple Jumpsuits. Just as the debris finishes raining down, Farmer Ted runs onto the scene, sees the only other living thing around, and shoots it.

Opening credits. A lovely set of images I'll be watching muted from now on. I notice Jolene Blalock's credit coincides with film of a Saturn V booster thrusting upward on powerful engines. You don't gotta be Fellini to figure that one out.

Returning from the break, we see a small shuttle ferrying Admiral Kirk to the newly-refurbished NCC 1701 for his inspection--damn it! Ferrying Captain Archer on an inspection of the outer hull of the NX-01 Enterprise, piloted by Sulu--Gah! Chief Engineer Charles "Trip" Tucker, whom I've been told bears a striking resemblance to Tommy Lee Jones. Archer gets a call from Admiral FORREST to come down to Starfleet MEDICAL at once.

On Earth, a gaggle of human admirals and Vulcan ambassadors enter an observation room looking in on where doctors are working on the wounded Klingon. There's a lot of protuberance-waving between the two groups over who should be in charge of the situation. The humans claim jurisdiction since he crashed on our planet. The Vulcans claim that if we tried to deal with it on our own, we'd only screw it up and start a war. They have a point, but Our Hero arrives on the scene and convinces the admirals to throw off the chains of Vulcan oppression and let him taxi the Klingon, who we learn is named Klang, to Kronos in his shiny new starship. The emotionless Vulcans do a fair approximation of being peeved when they realize they aren't going to get their way, and logically conclude the time is right to storm out of the room. Archer calls over the doctor who's been working on Klang, and after the scene ends, invites him to do his doctoring on the Enterprise.

Back up in spacedock, armory officer Lt. Malcolm Reed and helmsman Ensign Travis Mayweather are watching the single transporter pad in operation, bringing up materials and supplies. Even though this pad has been "improved for bio-transport," meaning it can transport living people and keep them that way, everyone is about as enthusiastic about trying it as Doctor McCoy was in the original Star Trek series. The package for which these two were waiting materializes, and Lt. Reed is lack of shocked to discover they sent the wrong techno-do-jobbers. As they head down to Engineering to complain, we learn that Lt. Reed does a mean southern accent and Mayweather grew up someplace off Earth where the gravity was adjustable.

Next, we head off to Klingon language summer camp to meet communications officer Hoshi Sato. Um, that is, a very serious and progressive alien language educational seminar in Brazil. It seems Hoshi has a uniquely keen ear for languages. Hoshi is reluctant to leave her campers, um, students until Archer bribes her with the opportunity to learn a new alien language before anyone else. We also learn that Star Fleet had to make some concessions to the Vulcans in return for the language sample. What kind of concessions? Hmm, I wonder.

Back once more to the ship, where Archer and Trip are walking so we can see lots of different locations. They're discussing how Star Fleet accepted having a Vulcan on board as science officer in return for star charts showing where Kronos is. Trip sees the Vulcan as a spy, while Archer tells him to consider her a "chaperone." They both want her off the ship as soon as the mission is over. They enter the captain's ready room/quarters, I'm not sure which, where we meet Porthos, Archer's beagle. I can only hope there isn't an episode ahead of us where Porthos saves the ship by anything but accident. I mean literally having an accident and peeing on the enemy. Cute doggie, though. T'Pol slinks into the room and officially reports for duty. There's more introductions and plenty of good natured ribbing. It turns out T'Pol doesn't want to be there either. Still, Porthos likes her. Likes her leg, anyway.

It's the launching ceremony for the Enterprise. Some admiral gives a speech, and all the humans applaud while the Vulcans in the room trade meaningful looks, disgusted by the admiral's weak swimming metaphor. From the speech, we learn that Captain Archer's dad worked directly with the exalted Zephram Cochrane himself on warp technology, and that the Enterprise is the first ship to use the engine the elder Archer and Cochrane designed. This is presumably the ship mentioned in the first scene, which would mean the Vulcans kept it out of production for thirty years. No wonder humans don't like them very much. Sadly, it also means no one has made any technological advances in warp engine design in three decades. As the crew boards the Enterprise and prepares to leave, we get a voiceover of Cochrane reading a dedication speech which closely follows the "Space: the final frontier" speech from the original series. Bored by the speech, Archer flashes back to the first scene, where it is somewhat later in the day and he's installing the antigrav generator in his model rocket. Estes has come a long way since 2001. Archer snaps out of it in time to give Mr. Mayweather the Go command. Maybe I watched Galaxy Quest too many times, but I was just waiting for the ship to scrape against the side of the spacedock on the way out. It didn't, though. Mayweather lays in a course for Kronos, which T'Pol criticizes (way to inspire confidence in the crew when heading out in a largely untested vehicle, babe), and off they go.

Elsewhere, a Lumpy Green Guy enters a chamber to speak with the hologram of Emperor Palpat-- that is, the shadowy faceless image of the man giving the Lumpies their orders. Lumpy reports that two of his sub-lumpies were killed and asks if their deaths can be prevented. Shadowy Guy says no, but it's still obvious that whoever this is has some ability to fiddle with time. It seems the rumors of a time travel overarc are true.

Well, so far so good. What am I, about half way through? Oh man, that's just the first commercial? What have I gotten myself into?

Back to the show. Archer is in sick bay, helping Dr. Neelix, oops, Phlox unpack and inquiring about the odds of the Klingon being able to leave the ship under his own power when they reach Kronos. Phlox, despite being pulled off a cushy 9 to 5 job on Earth as part of the Vulcan-instituted medical exchange program, is excited about having the chance to study human biology under field conditions, as it were. Phlox tells Archer there's a chance the Klingon will wake, and a chance he won't, so stay optimistic. Then he smiles this CGI-enhanced Joker smile, giving me a first class case of the heebie jeebies. I can only hope they won't have the budget to do that every week.

Trip crawls through a Jeffries tube and discovers Mayweather sitting upside down on the ceiling of a room with no obvious function. Mayweather explains that this location is the "sweet spot," a place where the artificial gravity goes all wonky. He tells Trip to grab both sides of the hatch and push off, which Trip misunderstands as an invitation. He launches himself up into the room, bonking his head on the ceiling/floor. Somehow, the starship's chief engineer was totally unaware that such gravity inversions occurred, or that they could be used as cheap excuses for wire work. What follows is a classic "We're not gay. No, really," conversation, starting with the tip-off line, "Have you ever slept in zero gee?" "Do you like gladiator movies?"

T'Pol and Archer are in the captain's mess, making small talk while waiting for Trip to arrive. I'm starting to think Bakula is a diversion to keep us from realizing we're watching The Trip Show. Vulcans aren't a touristy bunch, all their recreational needs being satisfied within the confines of the Vulcan compound in Sausalito. I have mental images of Vulcans playing volleyball and tennis, trying to body surf in the wave pool, and discoing until the break of dawn. Anyway, Trip arrives, and the steward brings T'Pol her vegetarian plate, and huge steaks for the other two. It looks like real, honest to God meat, too. None of that syntho-protien crap they eat in the 24th century. T'Pol disapproves, and uses it as a springboard to launch yet another offensive against the barbarity of humanity, while she cuts a hard breadstick in half with knife and fork because Vulcans are too civilized to come in contact with their food. I figure they keep it suspended inside their digestive tract with their mental powers until their highly trained stomach acid artillery can bombard it into its component molecules.

One ship flyby later, everyone is on the bridge as they push the ship to the upper end of its speed limit. Hoshi gets increasingly nervous as the speed increases, thinking she feels tremors in the ship. T'Pol suggests that maybe Hoshi would like to have a good lie down, to which Hoshi responds, in Vulcan, expressing a sentiment that I never would have guessed the Vulcan language had words for. Dr. Phlem calls the bridge to tell the captain that the Klingon has awoken.

Down in sick bay, Klang is ranting in Klingonese, and Hoshi is nervously trying to get a handle on what he's saying, using both a language translator and her own ability. The Klingon's aggressiveness has her spooked. Once the doctor confirms that Klang is out of his mind, Hoshi regains some self-assurance. She must feel better about not making sense of what he's saying once she knows he's not making sense in the first place. Suddenly, everything breaks.

We are shown a group of Lumpy Green Guys skulking down a hallway with the lights out. Up on the bridge, Reed thinks he saw something on the sensors just as the power went out, but he can't be sure. Down in sickbay, they've broken out the MagLites. Klang is ranting again. Across the room, one of the light beams illuminates the quickly fading form of a Lumpy in a stairwell. They look more closely, then search the entire room, eventually finding Spider-Lumpy crawling across the ceiling. Someone shoots first without asking questions. As they're killing that Lumpy, they completely miss seeing a second one leap off the ceiling onto the exam table with the Klingon. Soon, the lights come back up and they discover that Klang's gone missing.

On a side note, it's been a bad day for Hoshi. The ship's all creaky, T'Pol was snide at her, a Klingon yelled at her, she saw a spooky half-invisible alien, then saw it fall dead right in front of her. I just know she's thinking, "I could be back in Brazil, sucking down fruity drinks and conga-ing with muscular tanned beach bums. It's Carnival. But no, I had to learn Klingon. Stupid, stupid!"

On the bridge some time later, T'Pol and Archer discuss whether or not to continue the mission now that the Klingon is gone. Specifically, Archer wants to go find him and get him back, while T'Pol wants to write the whole delivery mission off simply because they no longer have anything to deliver or any way to find him. Archer isn't convinced, and calls T'Pol into a side room for a private chat. In what must be Archer's ready room, backed by some delightful art of previous ships named Enterprise, Archer vents about how the Vulcans have spent the last hundred years pretending to help humanity while actually holding us back, and how he won't have it on his ship. He orders her to go out and help try to find Klang instead of just standing there saying it can't be done.

Returning to sickbay, we get a name for the Lumpy Green Guys: Suliban. Phlox is dissecting the dead one using actual medical tools and cutting open the body to look inside. Keen. He finds all kinds of genetic and anatomical changes, from extra lung capacity to chameleonic skin and clothes, which he points out to Archer with the glee of a man who knows he's grossing someone out. Phlox declares the dead Suliban the recipient of advanced genetic engineering.

Down in engineering, T'Pol is trying to convince Trip that the Enterprise's sensors are woefully inadequate to the task of tracking the plasma trail warp signature thingy of the stealth ship that took Klang away. Trip takes this personally, and we are treated to yet another "Humans good, Vulcans bad" speech. I think we get it, guys. Archer shows up, closely followed by Hoshi, who has translated most of what the Klingon said before he was taken. Using a crowbar and pliers, Archer gets T'Pol to give up some backstory on the Suliban ("Mostly harmless") and to reveal that Rigel Ten was Klang's last stop before hitting Earth, so to speak. They set course and head off.

Somewhere, the Suliban have Klang strapped down and drugged up, and are interrogating him. They learn that he was sent to Rigel Ten to meet a Suliban woman named Sarin. The interrogators think she gave him something, but he doesn't know what they are talking about. The head interrogator leaves, no doubt to do something nefarious.

The Enterprise arrives at Rigel Ten, and a landing party is being briefed. Pretty much every cast member we've met so far is in the party. Which means pretty much the head of every department and all the senior officers. If you wondered where that idea originated, here it is. Their goal is to find the person Klang was sent to meet, and find out what was so dang important. They land on the roof of a trading complex and descend into the city to begin their search. At this point, the broadcast screwed up, so there is a break in the narrative.

When the picture comes back, T'Pol is warning her away team buddy, Trip, not to get involved in some local affair.

Mayweather and Reed, meanwhile, have made their way to a club with multicolored dancing girls with two and a half foot tongues and how did they convince the censors that body paint was an article of clothing? There was something about finding a guy who saw Klang, or a guy showing them where he saw Klang, but I wasn't really paying attention. Well, I was, but not to that. Moving on....

In Down Below, the lurkers gather along the corridors…scratch that. Trip is waiting in a hallway that is filled with various aliens while T'Pol checks in with the local cops. He sees a woman alternately pulling a breather mask off a child's face and putting it back on. T'Pol appears and contacts Archer, telling him about a part of the complex where Klingons are known to gather. Finally, Trip's had all he can stands and he can't stands no more. He yells at the woman to stop torturing the kid, and T'Pol explains that what she's doing is a natural part of that alien species' development. She then goes on to berate humanity for trying to understand alien behavior through the filter of human experience, instead of trying to see it objectively. She should've been a teacher, she likes lecturing so much. Little did they know, a Suliban spy was watching their every move, hidden from them by the clever ruse of facing the other way. I guess he was listening to their every move.

Archer and Hoshi, in the Klingon sector T'Pol told them about, are having a tough time finding anyone to talk to. They get nervous, a feeling only intensified by the soundtrack kicking in with the anticipatory dread theme. Archer pulls out his by-God communicator and tries to call T'Pol, but something is scrambling the signal. Big shock. I think standing too close to a microwave will do that. They realize they are surrounded just as the people surrounding them attack. Aw, no fight music. They are overpowered three to two, depending on how you want to count Hoshi, and dragged away to an uncertain fate. Well, other than knowing they'll live because they're main characters.

Yes! Halfway through. It's all downhill from here.

Hoshi gets thrown into a holding cell along with T'Pol and Trip. No telling what happened to Reed and Mayweather. The Suliban, for it was they who jumped our heroes, drag the captain off to a place where he is confronted, in true Classic Trek fashion, with a hot alien babe. Sarin, in fact, the Suliban that Klang went to Rigel Ten to meet. Except that she is neither lumpy nor green. Archer, being the first human Star Fleet captain, is obviously unaware that all alien babes can somehow sense the fact that he is a captain, and that this knowledge compels them to throw themselves at him. So he is startled and confused when she puts a Suliban liplock on him. Afterwards, she shape shifts back into her Suliban skin tone (another shock, to be sure) and explains that she needed close contact in order to use her Good Guy detector power. She then explains that she is a rebel of sorts, that her species has volunteered to be upgraded in return for service, but she was unwilling to pay the price required anymore. She further revealed that the Suliban were trying to destabilize the Klingon Empire by faking attacks between factions. Klang was bringing proof of that, provided by Sarin, to the Klingon High Council. Her final bit of expository revelation is that the Suliban are acting under orders from the far future as part of "a temporal cold war." Just as she's getting to the practical part of the conversation, what to do next, the nonrebel Suliban attack.

In the ensuing gun fight, the captive crew members are released, and Sarin doesn't even make it off the first set. She gets blasted just as everyone boards an elevator to the roof. Her dying words are the ever-so-helpful, "Find Klang."

On the roof, we see the incident that led to Star Fleet Regulation 19, first stated in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home, "Everybody remember where we parked." The landing pod is nowhere to be seen, and each crewman thinks it lies in a different direction. They pick a direction at random, and Archer calls Reed on his communicator to tell him to return to the shuttle. This is when we discover that Reed and Mayweather are already back at the ship and have been trying to call the captain all this time. So, why did these two even have that scene in the strip bar with the alien who said he'd seen Klang? It may be my imagination, but I sense some tension and shame between Reed and Mayweather, like they'd done something they've sworn never to discuss again. They couldn't sit farther apart inside that shuttle if they tried.

The Suliban catch up to the crew on the roof, and another firefight begins. T'Pol locates the shuttle. What happens next is a little confusing. It appears that while the gun battle is going on, another unrelated ship lifts off nearby, and as it flies over T'Pol, its repulsorlift backwash or whatever you want to call it pushes T'Pol out into the middle of the fight. Archer orders Trip to get Hoshi into the ship, then leaps out next to T'Pol in heroic cowboy captain fashion and starts firing twin plasma pistols toward the enemy to cover her retreat, despite her arguing that he was more important than her. On his way to join everyone else on the shuttle, Archer gets shot in the leg. Luckily, no one seems to have invented vaporize-on-contact phasers yet. Archer gets dragged aboard, and the shuttle lifts off. T'Pol calls the Enterprise to get the medical team ready for their arrival, and announces that she'll be taking command.

Meanwhile, Archer flashes back to his youth with that model rocket and his dad, in which he nosedives it right into the sand. His dad tells him he can't be afraid of the wind. I only mention this because there is a callback to it later.

During the commercial, everyone made it back on board the Enterprise, and Dr. Phlox tested everyone for infestation of any sort. Having detected polycystine spores on T'Pol and Trip, his treatment is to have them rub gelatin on each other under black lighting. I'm half convinced he was kidding, and will be selling the video rights next time they stop at a planet. I tried, folks. I watched this scene seven times in a row, twice in slow motion, trying to glean the essence of it, trying to distill the wonder and grandeur of it into mere words, trying to find anything that furthered the plot or developed character. This is all I was able to come up with. It is quite chilly in the decontamination chamber. But not that cold. Archer is driven to finish what he starts, according to Trip. Trip has the self-restraint of an entire Tibetan monastery. If they have a scene like this every week, I think I can overlook that Phlox smiling thing.

On the other side of sickbay, Archer is lying in his undies with an osmotic eel on his Suliban zap gun wound. It's six hours later, and the wound is effectively healed. Having toweled themselves off, T'Pol and Trip walk in to see how Archer is doing. T'Pol reports that she took command of the ship, and Archer immediately assumes the ship is headed back to Earth. It turns out that they are in fact tracking the Suliban ship carrying the aliens that attacked them on Rigel Ten. T'Pol was able to modify the ship's sensors to be able to detect the plasma trail warp dingus. Which makes me wonder: if the sensors were capable of being sensitive enough to detect this kind of thing, why weren't they built to be that sensitive in the first place? When asked why she went after the Suliban, T'Pol explains that she was anticipating Archer's desires. Archer then points out that, while she was in charge, she could have done anything she wanted.

In the captain's quarters, we get to see the first Captain's Log. Also, he is recording a status report. Put some pants on, Cap'n! They're still using real dates instead of Stardates. As he describes what has been going on, he pauses periodically to make asides and offhand comments to his dog. Mostly, he is troubled that he cannot understand what motivated T'Pol not to end the mission when she had the chance. He cannot decide whether he should trust her or not. He is interrupted by the ship coming out of warp, and contacts the bridge to find out why. In true Trek form, he isn't given any useful information in response, only a suggestion that he come to the bridge to find out.

He arrives to discover the ship in proximity to a gas giant which the Suliban ship flew close enough to to mask whatever it is the Enterprise has been tracking all this time. The trail is lost, and things look grim. But wait! A quick scan of the area locates numerous fragmentary trails, which they quickly realize came from not just one ship, but from fourteen different ships, and quickly track the flight paths of all the ships into the gas giant. They quickly realized that the planet is obviously the location of the secret Suliban base. These people are quick, I'll give them that. Archer orders the weapons armed and hull polarized, which I expect is like shields before they invented shields. They're going in.

In the Suliban Talk-to-the-Leader Room, the head Suliban is talking to the Shadowy Guy from the Future. He reports that the Enterprise has arrived, looking for either Klang or himself, he doesn't know which. Shadowy Future Guy wasn't planning on involving the humans, but if they threaten to get proof of the Klingon manipulation back to the Klingons, they must be stopped.

Entering the planet's atmosphere, the Enterprise gets jostled as it passes through several layers of thick, sensor-jamming gas and liquid. Breaking through to a more sedate layer, they immediately spot the Suliban base and concentrate all their sensors on it, ignoring the rest of the sky around them. Which sprouts nasties that start shooting at them. They retreat into the liquid phosphorus layer that gave them so much trouble coming in.

Given a few seconds to study all that sensor data, T'Pol determines that the base is actually a collection of smaller ships all magnetically bound together, while Hoshi locates a non-Suliban life sign on the base. Reed suggests using the transporter to collect what is hopefully the Klingon, but Archer rejects the idea on grounds that an inside-out Klingon is not an acceptable deliverable. Instead, Archer asks about using the grappler.

The ship dives back out of the phosphorus and attracts the attention of three Suliban pods. They close, and at the right moment the Enterprise fires a pair of magnetic grapples on long tethers. The grapples attach to one of the pods, which is then reeled into the Enterprise. The pilot ejects, without any apparent way to survive not being inside his pod. Happy with their catch, Enterprise returns once more to the phosphorus layer.

Archer, Trip, and Mayweather (get that man a shorter nickname!) are standing around a display table. Mayweather is giving Trip a crash course (once again, my apologies) in flying a Suliban battle pod. I'm not sure how Mayweather knows. Maybe intuitive understanding of ship controls is part of his character. In any event, Trip learns about as well as one might expect of a person whose chosen field is running the engine while somebody else steers. Mayweather insists he can and should fly the pod, but Archer tells him he is needed on the Enterprise. Meanwhile, T'Pol reports that the Suliban are launching depth charges up into the phosphorus layer to try to locate them. And if the ship doesn't move soon, they will succeed.

In the captain's ready room, Archer is giving T'Pol orders for while he is gone with Trip to the Suliban base to rescue Klang. T'Pol argues that attempting the rescue alone is suicide, and points out that there is a Vulcan ship two days away which could provide much needed support. Archer reminds her that the point of the mission is partly to prove that humans don't need to rely on the Vulcans, a point T'Pol thinks could be made just as easily later under less lethal circumstances. Armory officer Reed arrives with two metal cases. One contains a device to reverse the polarity of the magnetic locks holding the base together, while the other holds two phase pistols, precursors to the phaser with two settings: stun and kill.

The pod drops out of the Enterprise, Archer and Trip aboard. As they plummet, a red light flashes on the alien control panel. Concerned, Archer asks Trip what it means. Trip tells him that Mayweather told him not to worry about it.

On the Enterprise, Reed and T'Pol discuss moving the ship after one of the depth charges comes too close for comfort. Reed wants to move to make the Suliban restart their search pattern from scratch, and T'Pol wants to remain where Archer and Trip can find them when they return.

In the pod, they circle the Suliban base looking for a parking space, Archer using what might be a tricorder. What he's using it for, I have no idea. But it works. They find a place and dock. Inside the base, everything is dark and blue. As they search around, they run across a Suliban, whom Archer stuns without a moment's hesitation.

On the ship, the depth charges have gotten too close. While there hasn't been any structural damage or loss of life, several control panels have exploded in a shower of sparks, and it's only a matter of time before someone gets hurled violently across the bridge. T'Pol orders the ship moved five kilometers away.

On the base, Archer and Trip saunter into the room where Klang is being held, with no apparent opposition. Must be night shift. As soon as Trip releases the Klingon, he starts going berserk as only a Klingon can, until Archer points his shiny new phase pistol at him. Then he calms down and lets Trip escort him out of the room and into the next gun fight. While the humans are shooting back at the Suliban shooting at them, another Suliban tries to come up behind them. He wasn't expecting the Klingon to be there to knock him silly. Archer orders Trip and Klang (describe what happens when a knight doesn't see the cat underfoot) to get to the pod, then sets the maglock polarity reverser bomb. It goes off, and the place goes to pieces. In a minor tactical error, Archer finds himself on the wrong side of a containment field as the place begins locking itself down in response to the magbomb's disruption. To make things worse, people have also started shooting at him again. Via communicator, Archer orders Trip to take Klang back to the Enterprise, then come back for him. Trip cautions Archer to stay as far from the Suliban as possible so that sensors can more easily locate him.

When the pod carrying Trip and the Klingon arrives at the location where Enterprise used to be, they are understandably upset that the ship isn't there now. Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, the depth charges are getting closer again, and T'Pol is about to move the ship when Hoshi claims to hear Trip talking. Talking at normal volume in the middle of a bombardment at a distance of five kilometers. If they want to claim she has that level of ability, I'm not gonna stop them. Hoshi hears Trip say he's about to "ignite his thruster exhaust," which ship's sensors are able to pick up amidst the maelstrom. They set a course and head to pick up the pod. T'Pol says, "Thank you," to Hoshi in Vulcanese, denoting a closure to their conflict and a new bond between them yadda yadda. As the Enterprise approaches the pod, sensors are able to discern biosigns on the pod well enough to determine only two passengers are aboard, one human, one Klingon.

Archer is wandering around the Suliban base for no particular reason I can think of, scanning things with his proto-tricorder (possibly just a bicorder), when he spots a hallway that makes his tricorder's display go all wiggly. He decides to investigate. At the end of the hall is a set of doors that open at his approach. "What a neat idea," Archer thinks. There is a second set of doors behind these, and as Archer steps past the first set, they close, trapping him in the space between. Lights strobe for few seconds before the other set of doors opens. Archer goes through them, staring intently at his scanning doohickey.

There is some sort of time distortion in the room Archer has just entered. Whenever something moves, it blurs with foreshadows and afterimages. This has happened every time we have seen this room. It just hasn't been important until now. As Archer notices the effect, he experiments with it, doing the visual equivalent of shouting, "Echo" into a canyon.

Back on the ship, Trip and T'Pol are arguing again. Will these two get a room already? Trip insists that when the captain said, "Come back for me," he meant it. T'Pol believes that Archer just said that to prevent Trip from trying to pick him up right then, jeopardizing the Klingon's life further. She thinks he willingly sacrificed himself for the good of the mission. She claims that a logical analysis of the situation clearly indicates the rightness of her position. Trip counters by reminding her that Archer didn't analyze anything when he saved her life on the rooftop on Rigel Ten. She proclaims the comparison to be "specious."

Back in the weird time room, Archer sees the door open again, but does not see anyone enter. He hears him, though. The invisible Suliban leader taunts Archer and warns him not to fire his snazzy new ray gun within the weird time room. Archer tries to get the bad guy to show himself so he can shoot him. I love humans.

Back on the ship, suddenly the plan is to attempt a rescue of the captain. Perhaps there was a scene cut where the convincing argument was made, or maybe that last argument between Trip and T'Pol was more influential than I thought. Anyway, up on the bridge, they're making preparations for an attack run, while Trip is standing behind unidentified machinery, worried about an "annular confinement" error of 2 microns. Gee, let me think. What Trek tech do I know of that is associated with the term "annular confinement" and could be useful in a rescue? Hmm….

Again, back to the Suliban base, the invisible bad guy tells Archer that he's no real threat because he doesn't really know anything. The only real beef he's got is that Archer is in the weird time room. Archer can walk out and go on his merry way. And yet, when Archer brings up the temporal cold war, the bad guy feels compelled to body slam Archer. Maybe Archer does know enough to be dangerous after all. So, the bad guy picks up the gun he specifically said not to fire in this room and fires it at Archer. Because of the weird time, Archer is able to see where the fatal beam is going to be, and dodges it. When the beam hits the wall, there's some sort of backlash that knocks the bad guy across the room, during which he drops the gun. He finds it again shortly, of course, and fires at the first unusual noise he hears. Unfortunately for him, it was the noise of something Archer threw against the wall as a distraction so he could run out of the room. The backlash helps to push Archer out the door, but the alien also manages to get out before the doors close. They struggle some more while the strobe light effect occurs again.

Outside, the Enterprise is making its attack run, and taking far too much fire to be able to dock and recover the captain with any degree of safety. Having screwed up Plan A within seconds, T'Pol calls Trip and tells him to be ready with secret escape Plan B.

Back inside to the fight. Archer and the bad guy continue to wrestle on the floor, the phase pistol being inconveniently located for either one to reach. No, wait. Let's not forget how bendy these guys are. The bad guy twists his arm in some impossible way and grabs the gun. Archer leaps up and starts running away like a scared little girl-I mean, he stages a hasty retreat. The bad guy stands, aims, and fires. At the same moment, T'Pol orders Trip to activate the transporter and bring the captain aboard. They haven't invented saying, "Beam him up," yet. The first thing Trip does when Archer appears, safe and sound, on the transporter pad, is to apologize for putting him through it. Judging by Archer's reaction to finding himself there, it was the right thing to do. The Enterprise leaves the gas giant without being pursued, and finishes its trip to Kronos.

In the Klingon High Council chamber, the council is in session. Which is to say, many Klingons are standing around shouting at each other. There is a pounding at the door. The sergeants at arms open them up, revealing Klang, flanked by Archer, Hoshi, and T'Pol. They enter the chamber, and Klang announces that he is ready to die. Sheesh, all that trouble for nothing. They could've killed him two hours ago and saved us a whole movie. Wait, it seems to be a ritual greeting. Those wacky Klingons. Someone who may be the Klingon emperor walks up to Klang and slashes Klang's palm open with his palm-slashing knife. Another Klingon gathers the blood in a test tube, takes it over to a wall computer, and pours it onto a scanner. The computer analyzes the blood and finds data stored in a particular gene on a particular chromosome. Dead or alive, the Klingons would have gotten the information if they got the body. Klang appears not to have known he was carrying this information. The Emperor walks up to Archer and says something in Klingon that Hoshi refuses to translate and that he's willing to accept as a thank you.

Epilogue: Archer calls Trip and T'Pol into his ready room to tell them that's he's received new orders from Star Fleet. Since the ship is already out there doing its thing, they are ordered to keep on doing it. The Vulcans are sending a transport to pick up T'Pol. However, Archer has an offer for her. He wants her to stay on as Science Officer, but if he were to ask the Vulcans to allow it, he thinks it would appear he was still dependent on Vulcans for his success. She suggests that if she were to make the request to stay on board, it would avoid that embarrassment.

Back on the bridge, Archer announces the new orders to the bridge crew. Their first task is to investigate an inhabited planet so different from Earthlike conditions that the inhabitants are quite likely to be unlike anything they've ever seen before. Everyone is really looking forward to it. Mayweather notices an ion storm on the path to the planet and informs Archer of it, asking if he should go around it. Recalling what his father said lo, those many years ago, Archer told him, "You can't be afraid of the wind." Of course, Archer has yet to learn that over 86 percent of all free-floating galactic perils, including hyperintelligent hives of microbes, giant paramecia, displaced gods, doomsday devices, spatial anomalies, wormholes, time warps, malfunctioning and/or ancient technology, and energy-based life forms, all register as simple ion storms until you come right up against one. However, I suppose this is an age of discovery.

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.

It’s morning on the Enterprise, and Nameless Female Ensign is in the galley enjoying a bowl of Vulcan Veggie Breakfast Broth and catching up on some light reading, Termites of Loracis Prime. I’ll bet she’s tons of fun at parties. Nameless Male Ensign (no relation) walks over to her table and sits down, bringing possibly eggs and sausage with him. He derides her culinary choice. “I guess it just takes a more discriminating palette to appreciate Vulcan cuisine,” she retorts. Ooh, what a burn. I’m going to rename her, Vulcan Groupie Girl. I got a hunch. Vulcan Groupie Girl starts telling Nameless Male Ensign all about termites in an obvious ploy to drive him away, when he gets distracted by a shiny object. They both head over to a porthole, and discover a blue-green planet has snuck up on the ship. Vulcan Groupie Girl asks the room at large, “Anyone hear about this?” Ensign Bit Part replies, “Not a word.” They spend a few moments pondering the possibilities of a first contact situation while their food gets cold.

Up on the bridge, everyone waits anxiously while T’Pol scans the planet through her ViewMaster™. It’s a lot like Earth, except with no pesky indigenous population to muck it up. Archer has Reed scan for any sign that someone else has laid claim to the planet. “None in range, sir. It looks like no one’s planted a flag just yet.” That’s all Archer needed to hear. “Prep a shuttle pod, Mr. Tucker.” I was counting the seconds until T’Pol threw cold water on the idea. Two seconds. “Captain, there are a number of protocols you may want to consider.” But I don’t wanna consider protocols! I wanna go to the planet naaaooowww! All the probing and analyzing she recommends will take a week. Trip, whom I am increasingly convinced suffers from ADD, whines, “You expect us to sit up here for a week while probes have all the fun?” No, Mr. Tucker, I expect you to die. Archer belittles T’Pol’s caution, saying, “We didn’t come out here to tiptoe around.” He then heaps on an extra helping of humiliation by asking/ordering her to organize the survey team. Is she even in the chain of command? She accepts the command with pouty-lipped stoicism, but I can sense a tiny fuse burning deep down inside her. Someday, Archer’s head is going to wind up on the pointy end of one of those pon farr fighting spears.

T’Pol is overseeing the loading of a shuttle by staring at a data pad and standing in flattering light. Vulcan Groupie Girl, who is to be part of the survey team, tells T’Pol about her breakfast. Even if T’Pol could care about things, she couldn’t care less. By way of conversation, Vulcan Groupie Girl thanks T’Pol for choosing her to go on the mission. “You were selected because your specialty is entomology,” T’Pol explains, shattering Vulcan Groupie Girl’s fragile ego, which derives entirely from the approval of others. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Entomology is the study of bugs, by the way. As Vulcan Groupie Girl loads her bug-studying equipment into the shuttle, Trip consoles her. “You’d have better luck making friends with a housefly.”

The shuttle launches, Mayweather at the wheel, Archer and Trip both standing, leaning on the back of the pilot’s seat. What, weren’t there enough chairs on board? They land in beautiful southern Califor- that is, an Earthlike yet totally alien world. The shuttle door opens, and the first Earthling to set foot on the “Strange New World” is…Porthos, the wonder dog. Who, in his first act as a planetary explorer, whizzes on a tree. He has been stuck on the ship for three weeks, after all. T’Pol starts scanning the environment with her proto-tricorder, as she was brought to the planet to do, until Archer tells her to “Put that thing away,” and simply enjoy being there for a minute. I don’t think Archer gets the whole emotionless Vulcan thing. Some small talk is exchanged, and Trip reveals that his hand scanner dealie is also a digital camera when he takes a snapshot of the rest of the team with it. T’Pol orders the extras to disperse and go about their phony-baloney jobs until sevenish. On every Starfleet uniform, there is a stripe of varying color outlining the shoulder region. I looked carefully, and none of the extras has a red stripe. I can’t tell who’s going to die first. If I had to guess, though, I’d pick the one we’ve never seen until this scene. Or was he Ensign Bit Part? As they wander off, T’Pol turns her attention back to the steamy Vulcan romance novel loaded into her data pad. “The day of Slock and T’Ring’s arranged marriage had arrived. As Slock waited at the altar for T’Ring to arrive after her meditation session, he once again analyzed their genetic structures in his thoughts, noting several potential reinforcements of useful genetic traits. Truly, the offspring of this pair-bonding would be at a minor advantage. His parents had chosen wisely.” Hot stuff.

We are treated to a montage of Exploration! Vulcan Groupie Girl scanning for eels in a stream; Trip, Archer, Mayweather, and Porthos walking across a field under two crescent moons; Nameless Male Ensign, the sensitive explorer, sniffing some yellow flowers; T’Pol sitting on a rock. As the captain and friends sit by a babbling brook, T’Pol calls them to find out what has made them fifteen minutes late for rendezvous. “We lost track of time,” he explains, amused by the Vulcan’s insistence on a modicum of discipline while visiting a place with possible unknown dangers. Then, they head back to the boat.

Back at the shuttle, T’Pol asks Archer if she can keep Ensigns Cutler and Navokovich on the planet overnight because they’ve “discovered several nocturnal marsupials” that she wants to study. I don’t know which two ensigns those are, but I’d guess they’re the ones that have had lines in this episode. Archer agrees. “I’m glad to see you’re getting into the spirit of things.” Trip requests that he and Mayweather also be allowed to stay on the planet overnight for no really good reason. “This isn’t shore leave. This is a research mission,” T’Pol points out. I honestly don’t know why she still bothers. Archer undercuts her yet again. “Why can’t it be a little bit of both?” He agrees to let them stay. I tell you, one night Archer’s going to wake up with T’Pol standing over his bed with a phase pistol. Sure, she’ll claim she was possessed by an incorporeal alien at the time, but no one will ever be sure. And, it looks like the ensign I marked for death is getting away unscathed.

That night, sitting around the campfire, Mayweather tells a ghost story while Vulcan Groupie Girl, the entomologist, swats at fireflies she should be studying. T’Pol sits off to the side reading her novel. I think Mayweather’s story was an original series episode plot. And there, on the airlock handle, was a hook! Vulcan Groupie Girl notices that all the fireflies have gone away. That’s just the kind of insightful observation they brought her along for. Suddenly, the wind kicks up and threatens to blow out the campfire. “A front is approaching from the southwest,” T’Pol explains. Thank you, Willard Scott. In response to the gusting winds and lightning, everyone goes into their Gore-Tex tents for a nap. While Trip and Mayweather compete in an “I’ve been in worse storms than this,” contest in one tent, Nameless Male Ensign thinks he hears someone outside the tent he shares with Vulcan Groupie Girl. T’Pol, alone, tries to keep her tent from blowing away.

Suddenly, Trip feels something moving around in his sleeping bag. As T’Pol is in a different tent, neither of the other two alternatives appeals to him. He jumps up and sees a scorpion-like bug in his bag. “Gimme your boot…so I can squash it!” Mayweather responds, “Are we allowed to squash alien life forms?” Stymied by this philosophical and procedural conundrum, Trip decides he wants to get a phase pistol and stun the bug. T’Pol, seeing the commotion in the other tent but unwilling to go outside and get her hair mussed by the wind, calls Trip on her communicator to find out what all the fuss is about. Just then, the wind starts blowing even harder, ripping the tent pegs out of the ground. They decide to evacuate to a nearby cave T’Pol located earlier but never had reason to mention on screen until now.

On board ship, Reed heads to Archer’s quarters to tell him about the windstorm. Reed recommends bringing the survey team off the planet. “I’ve got a shuttle on standby.” Archer contacts T’Pol, who is in the cave with the others. The cave has the traditional perfectly flat floor. She points out, “A landing under these conditions might be difficult.” Everyone agrees that the away team will be safe in the cave until the storm ends, at which point the shuttle can come get them. Archer has the shuttle remain on standby, just in case.

Going through their supplies, the away team realizes they’ve left their food packs back at the campsite. I would have expected them to be blown away by the same wind that drove the people underground, but Mayweather volunteers to go back and get them. Meanwhile, Nameless Male Ensign thinks he hears movement in the back of the cave.

Out in the storm, Mayweather spots an MRE on the ground. He leaps for it just as a gust of wind blows it away. Hey, I was right. He catches it, though, and as he clutches his trophy to his chest, he sees the vague shape of someone moving among the trees. He calls out to the shape, “Hello?” but gets no response.

Mayweather returns to the cave and asks, “Was anybody outside just now?” No one was. Mayweather tells them he saw other people out there. “I think we’ve had enough ghost stories for one night,” Trip admonishes. T’Pol insists that no one else is on the planet, while Mayweather insists he saw three people. T’Pol scans the area with her Palm Pilot. “Other than ourselves, there are no humanoid life forms here.” Nameless Male Ensign, who gets the first name Ethan in this scene, hears the voices in the back of the cave again, and tells the others about it. “Are you going to tell me I’m imagining things, too?” Yes. Yes, I am. Trying to calm Ensign Ethan down, Trip suggests, “They could be friendly.” “Then why are they hiding?” Ethan is too clever for Trip’s head games. He wants to leave the cave. “And where do you propose we go?” asks T’Pol. “Back out into the storm?” Ethan thinks that is a pretty good idea, and runs out of the cave to implement his cunning plan. Trip orders Vulcan Groupie Girl, apparently the only one here he has any authority over, to stay in the cave while he and Mayweather hunt down Ethan, phase pistols in hand. Meanwhile, T’Pol grabs a gun and heads into the back of the cave. “There’s someone back there. I intend to find them.”

While T’Pol scans stalagmites, Mayweather and Trip search the woods for Ethan’s body. I mean Ethan. As they pass a rock outcropping, Trip sees a humanoid form coming out of the stone. He calls to Mayweather, but it’s gone by the time he gets there. “It came right out of the rock like it was a part of it.” “That could explain why they’re not showing up on our scanners.” Uh, it would? If you say so.

Poor Vulcan Groupie Girl is stranded all alone in the cave with only a phase pistol and a 1000-Watt lantern to protect her. She decides to go see what T’Pol is doing.

Trip and Mayweather continue to search. Having set their scanners for, “Find Crazy Crewman,” they almost fall into the infinitely deep, 10-foot wide chasm before spotting it. How is it that T’Pol can stand inside a cave and determine with her scanner that there no humanoids anywhere close to being nearby, but these two can’t find the only guy within walking distance?

Vulcan Groupie Girl sneaks up on T’Pol and sees her having a conversation with two aliens in an alien language. She approaches T’Pol and asks, “Who were you talking to?” T’Pol denies everything. “Talking to? There’s no one here.”

Archer is on the bridge, listening to Trip’s report. “We’ve lost Navokovich, and we’re apparently not alone.” Navokovich! Ethan Navokovich. That means Vulcan Groupie Girl is named Cutler. Twenty minutes into the episode, and finally I know all the characters’ names. Thank goodness. That extra typing was becoming tedious.

Trip and Mayweather return to the cave and tell the others that the captain is coming down in a shuttle to get them away from the dangerous rock-dwelling people. T’Pol once again attempts to use reason. “The rocks are composed of limestone and cormolite, nothing more.” Cutler jumps in to contradict T’Pol. “She’s lying, commander. I saw her talking to them.” It’s a good thing I finally worked out her name. I don’t think Vulcan Groupie Girl applies anymore. Cutler confronts T’Pol. “Why don’t you tell us what they want?”

Archer and Reed are descending through the stormy atmosphere in a shuttle pod. Archer manages to contact Ethan via communicator and orders him back to the cave for pickup. The response is less than satisfactory. “Go to hell!” Mr. Reed, is this thing armed? No? Damn.

In the cave, Trip confronts T’Pol. “I have no reason to deceive you,” she insists. “I can’t explain what you’ve seen, but I assure you I didn’t speak to anyone.” In counterpoint, Trip says, “I’d like to believe you, but you Vulcans don’t exactly have a spotless track record when it come to being honest with us.” Oh, boy. Here it comes. Yet another “Vulcans Bad” speech. This one is mercifully cut short by Archer calling to tell them where to meet the shuttle.

Archer tries to land the shuttle, but there’s “a lot of wind shear near the surface.” He scrapes the right wing against a rock face, damaging some thrusters and causing a coolant leak. Why is the captain flying the shuttle under the very hazardous conditions? Why don’t they have people specifically for that, so the captain or main helmsman doesn’t have to pilot every mission? Reed reminds Archer, “We can’t safely land in this wind with a thruster out.” Archer aborts the rescue, ordering the away team to make do until after the storm. “If you run across any more of these aliens, try to make contact.” Good idea, captain. Give them something to do while they await their deaths.

The survey team retreats to the cave, where Trip quickly summarizes the situation. “We’re stuck down here for God knows how long with a bunch of rock people who, for all we know, are staring at us from these walls right now.” Trip, did you hear what you just said? Maybe you should listen when T’Pol calls you irrational in a few seconds. “You’ve never seen me irrational.” Whatever, man. Just trying to help. Mayweather notices that the water supply is running low. T’Pol says, “I detected water about 60 meters in that direction.” “That direction” being deeper into the cave. Everyone believes she really wants to go talk to her rock-people buddies. She offers to Trip, “Join me if you like.” Now everyone believes she’s trying to lure Trip away to do him. Harm. To do him harm. Trip whips out his phase pistol and tells T’Pol, “Sit down.”

On the Enterprise, Hoshi is trying to get Ensign Ethan, down on the planet, to say anything coherent. All she’s getting is a lot of tortured wailing. Archer orders Reed, down in the transporter room, to bring Ethan aboard. Reed pulls the three sliders to beam Ethan’s red, green, and blue bits aboard, but there’s a problem. “There are contaminants in the matter stream. The phase discriminator can’t seem to isolate the debris.” In short, Ethan materializes with wind-blown leaves and twigs embedded in him. Ew. On the upside, he didn’t explode.

Back in the cave, Trip asks what T’Pol is doing with her data pad/scanner just as she’s getting to the good part about the muscular stable boy and the Vulcan noblewoman enjoying a good romp at the 3-D chessboard. “Slowly, deliberately, his hand moved to his rook. He lifted it, and she could see in his eyes how he considered the many different moves available to him. Suddenly, with unexpected swiftness, he thrust his hand up onto the third tier, placing his rook to pin her queen between it and his king’s knight. She raised her eyebrow in new appreciation of the commoner’s skill. She was two moves from checkmate. It was inevitable. After so many years of growing accustomed to her husband’s playing style, this new challenger was fascinating. T’Ring was unsure if she would ever be satisfied playing with Slock ever again.”

Sorry. Got carried away. T’Pol claims to be studying the scans she’d made of the planet earlier in the day. “There’s nothing of scientific interest on this planet. Our mission here was a waste of time.” Trip, who is slurring his words, does not believe her. He clumsily grabs the doohickey from her, and plans to get Hoshi to translate it from Vulcan to English for him. “This could be evidence…[of] your little conspiracy.” T’Pol tells Trip she has learned something about humans on this mission. “You’re a far more dangerous species than I previously believed.” And don’t you forget it, sister. Trip’s paranoia has evolved to include a secret agreement between the Vulcans and the rock people to kill off the Enterprise crew as a way of getting humanity back under Vulcan’s thumb by proving we aren’t ready to be away from Earth by ourselves yet. T’Pol makes a mental note to bring the idea up at the next High Command meeting. Cutler and Mayweather, meanwhile, are sitting, leaned against a cave wall, nearly unconscious, not contributing much. I mention them in case you were wondering where they went. Trip continues to rant, and T’Pol tries to get him to see reason until she, too, snaps. Trip: “Did you see that?” T’Pol (with feeling): “All I see is a delusional engineer!” Whatever is making the others crazy is also affecting Little Miss Perfect. Mayweather spots a hallucinatory critter running along the cave ceiling, which Trip blasts.

In sickbay, Ethan has had all the debris surgically removed. It only went skin deep. If they’re going to have more transporter accidents in the future, I hope they’re more lasting. Gruesome, even. Dr. Phlox also discovers a hallucinogenic flower pollen in Ethan’s bloodstream, which is what caused the freaky behavior and his current unconsciousness. “He should be all right in three or four hours.” Remember that flower Ethan smelled during the montage? It was actually relevant. Phlox has no idea if the pollen will affect T’Pol more or less than the humans. Archer calls T’Pol and learns that she is being held captive. Trip explains his theory. Archer tells Trip about the pollen. “It causes heightened anxiety, hallucinations….” Trip refuses to believe Archer despite his Starfleet training on, “What to do when the Captain says you’re unhinged.” He does, however, relax for a moment, taking T’Pol out of immediate danger of being deep fat fried. Archer sends Reed to the bridge to work out how much longer the storm will last. Because meteorology is what security and armory officers do.

Planetside, Trip tries to rouse Mayweather from his drugged stupor to help defend against the rock people. Mayweather is so far gone he can’t even speak. Trip continues on his anti-Vulcan rant. T’Pol seems to have reverted to speaking Vulcan. Whether that’s voluntary or not is unclear. Trip tries to reason with the imaginary rock people. “Tell you what. Come out, and we’ll settle this peacefully. Whatever she told you about humans, it’s not true. You can see for yourself. Say something!” He then shoots the nearest rock face, severely undercutting his own credibility. T’Pol spots an unattended phase pistol and awaits her chance to grab it. She gets that chance when Trip decides one of the rock formations is someone called Mr. Velik and starts explaining himself to it. T’Pol reaches the pistol just as Trip notices the action, and the two end up in a Mexican standoff.

After receiving the news that the storm isn’t likely to end for another nine hours, Archer gets called to sickbay for another punch to the gut. Dr. Phlox spouts some mumbo jumbo, the practical upshot of which is that when the pollen breaks down in the blood, it becomes a poison. There is an antidote, but Phlox doesn’t think he caught the problem in time for it to do much good. He’s really very upset about the whole thing. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Captain.” I’m finding that in every episode there has been one scene or snippet of dialog that nails who one character or other is and what they’re about. This is that scene. Anyway, Archer asks about the others’ prognoses. “I’ve got four people down on the surface, Doctor. I need to know if they’re going to be dead when we get there in the morning.” Phlox doesn’t have an answer.

Back in the cave, Trip and T’Pol are still mutually threatening. Cutler and Mayweather are effectively out of the picture, but for some reason Trip is not about to pass out like the others. Archer calls, and warns them about the poisonous effects of the pollen. He explains that they are sending down a batch of the antidote via transporter, and that, “it’s imperative that you inoculate yourselves as soon as possible,” to maximize the chance of recovery. Trip, still convinced that T’Pol is up to something, insists, “An injection isn’t going to change a damn thing.” T’Pol, speaking Vulcan, warns Archer that she believes Trip is going to kill her. Hearing that language almost sets Trip off again, until Archer, frankly, bullshits him, “You’ve heard of people suffering from dementia who revert to their native language. She can’t help it.” Considering that Trip isn’t buying the pollen story in the first place, maybe not the best way to go, but at least it’s consistent. Finally, Archer appeals to Trip’s loyalty. “Trust me now. Take the injection. Then we’ll deal with these rock people.” It might have worked, but Trip chooses this moment to dream up two Rock People forming behind T’Pol. “I’m not gonna die with a hypospray in my hand!”

At the transporter, Phlox places the antidote on the pad, and Reed sends it down.

Subtle manipulation having failed, Archer resorts to bald-faced lying. “Starfleet sent us here to make contact with a silicon-based life form. T’Pol was the only person granted clearance to speak with them.” Trip brings up some valid holes in the story, like why anyone besides T’Pol was allowed on the planet in the first place, but Archer patches them pretty well. The only way T’Pol can do what she came for is if Trip is not pointing a gun at her. Also, if she fails, Enterprise will destroy the rock people’s cave before they have a chance to destroy Enterprise. Hoshi then explains to T’Pol, in Vulcan, what they want her to do, cleverly keeping the big surprise from the viewers. Hoshi translates T’Pol’s reply, “Play-acting isn’t exactly a Vulcan tradition, but she’ll do her best.”

On the planet, T’Pol gets her chance to talk to the walls. Vulcan is a nice language to listen to, really, when you don’t know what it’s saying. She says something into the communicator along the lines of, “Was that enough?” As Archer waits for the hammer to fall, he comments to Hoshi, “I hope she knows the difference between stun and kill.” Hmm, maybe next time he ought to wait until after the transmission is ended before making pithy comments.

Here goes nothing. Archer tells Trip, “They’ve agreed to talk to her, Trip. So, lower your weapon and act real friendly.” Hesitantly, he does it, and T’Pol shoots him dead square in the chest. Was it stun or kill? Will we ever know? Did they actually mean for this to be suspenseful?

T’Pol fetches the antidote container from the cave entrance and juices everyone up. Mayweather still has enough strength to resist, so T’Pol gives him a good, old-fashioned Vulcan Nerve Pinch. I guess they do all learn how to do it. Can she mind meld, too? Is there any chance we won’t find out, one way or the other, before the end of the season?

Morning breaks, clear and calm, on the planet. The storm has passed. Trip wakes up to find T’Pol offering him a drink of water. “You didn’t shoot me last night, did ya?” All the humans wonder where the rock people went. “There were no rock people,” T’Pol tells them. “You were all hallucinating.” I told you so. Nanny nanny. Boo boo. T’Pol then explains that her speech to the walls was simply a ruse to get Trip to lower his weapon. “You were growing increasingly illogical and violent. Something about splitting me in two.” Maybe it’s because I’ve had these two pegged for a shipboard romance since their first scene together, but the way she says, “splitting me in two,” sounds like she’s not entirely opposed to the idea under the right circumstances. Innuendo and out the other. Anyway, they bond. Meanwhile, Mayweather has a neck ache from the nerve pinch. I don’t think they know Vulcans can do that. Also, it turns out that Ethan is going to survive after all. The shuttle arrives, and everyone heads toward it to leave this place. From the edge of the woods, the rock people wave goodbye. Not really, but they should have.

The episode begins with Archer in the shower when the artificial gravity quits. Wackiness and an artful display of clever camera angles ensue.

After the credits, it’s breakfast time. T’Pol is ladling out a bowl of Vulcan Breakfast Broth (continuity from last episode) while Phlox chides her for not being adventurous enough to eat the human food laid out on the buffet for everyone else. “I sampled human food on several occasions. It didn’t agree with me.” Phlox encourages her to try it again anyway, in hopes that she’ll get used to it. She goes over to the drinks dispenser and orders a glass of fizzy water. What comes out is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike fizzy water.

In Engineering, Trip is fielding multiple malfunction reports. Archer shows up to check on his progress. I’m thinking that shower thing made this a personal issue for him. “We know it’s got something to do with the plasma exhaust,” Trip explains to Archer. “The flow’s been restricted for some reason and it’s screwing up half the systems on the ship.” Hmm. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to run the toilets and vending machines through the warp core after all. Despite the effects of the mystery problem on the warp engines, Trip thinks he can fix whatever is wrong without coming out of warp. That is, until a panel blows open, fire billowing forth, right next to captain. As Archer puts out the fire with a handy extinguisher, Trip calls the bridge. “It might be a good idea to drop out of warp.” WAH Wah wah waaaah.

Up on the bridge, T’Pol spots the problem, which she explains to Reed, Archer, and Trip around the display table at the back of the bridge. “Something’s distorting our wake pattern,” she says, doing a game show model hand wave over the image on the screen. Something has hosed their warp field, which has corked the plasma exhaust like a potato in a tail pipe. Don’t ask me; I only write what I see. They discuss, and conclude that nothing on board ship could be causing it. Archer asks Reed what negative effects igniting the plasma exhaust would have on the ship. “If we polarize the hull plating, it should be all right, as long as we maintain half impulse.” Archer orders the protection and the speed, gets all the sensors looking backwards, and has Reed fire a torpedo to explode behind them. There’s a big blue cloud of an explosion, which didn’t seem to accomplish much. Archer then runs the tape back and forth, trying to spot details of interest. I have no idea what that might be like. Eventually, he spots the silhouette of an invisible ship. Trip comments, “Looks like we got ourselves a hitchhiker.” T’Pol analyzes, “They must be using some sort of stealth technology.” Hoshi ponders, “I wonder how long they’ve been there.” Archer cuts through the crap, “Long enough to throw half our systems out of whack.” How often do you hear about things being “in whack?”

Archer has Hoshi hail the other ship. Only the audio is working. Archer tells them to back off. Hoshi’s translator converts their reply from alien gibberish to English in five passes. “We are complying with your request. We ask you not to harm us.” Having worked out those 13 words, the translator is now fully fluent in the aliens’ language. “I wouldn’t mind an explanation,” Archer requests. The alien on the other end of the phone explains that their engine is busted, and they’ve been surfing the Enterprise’s wake while they tried to fix it. T’Pol’s sensors confirm that the other ship is broken. Archer asks the aliens to de-stealth (de-cloak sounds better, but it isn’t being called a cloaking device yet), which they do.

In sickbay, Phlox shoots Trip up with some drug that “should shorten the decompression process by half.” It seems Trip is going to go over to the alien ship and try to fix the engine of the so very much more advanced ship than the Enterprise. Naturally, since he’s better qualified to do the work than the actual alien engineers on board. “Three hours of decompression each direction, it makes more sense to stay until the job’s done,” is Archer’s explanation why Trip won’t be coming home every night. I’m going to be generous and assume they’re using the word “decompression” as shorthand for whatever process Trip has to go through to enter and leave the alien ship. If it were actually a pressure change, he would need to compress one direction and decompress coming back. And as long as it’s a gaseous atmosphere at a temperature humans can survive, the pressure difference can’t be that much anyway. Whatever. It’s just an excuse for Trip to stay on the other ship long enough to get knocked up anyway. I’ll give them credit for using the idea that not every species exists under the same ideal conditions. Then, there’s the food question. T’Pol explains, “They claim to have the ability to synthesize protein and carbohydrates. But there’s no telling what it may taste like. Try to be…diplomatic.” As a final bit of advice, Archer tells him, “Remember to mind your manners.” Oh, the foreshadowing, (a sign of great literature).

The shuttle pod approaches the alien ship, and docks. The pilot, Mayweather, reminds us that no one has seen the aliens yet because of the comm system problems. Trip reports to Archer that he is ready to board the other ship, then heads out the shuttle’s top hatch. Once Trip is sealed inside, Mayweather heads back to Enterprise. Trip is inside a copper cylinder about four feet across. As he calls out, “Hello?” a white gas is released into the chamber. Trip starts to panic and cough. A voice tells him, “Try to maintain your normal rate of respiration.” Which turns out not to be so easy when you’re being gassed in a small chamber on an alien spacecraft. “The discomfort will subside,” the voice assures him.

A couple of hours pass over the course of a commercial break. As Archer prepares lunch for Porthos the wonder dog, T’Pol interrupts him with an anxious call from Tucker, who has apparently forgotten his watch, and has therefore been calling Archer every five minutes. “How long’s it been, sir?” He’s not enjoying the “decompression” process, although his discomfort from before the break has subsided. The voice didn’t lie. Not the least bit concerned that anything harmful might be happening to his crewman, Archer tells Trip, “Be patient,” and cuts off communication to play with his dog.

Trip is watching lights flash on a display board inside the gas chamber. He recites color and number of flashes, until they speed up to a rate faster than he can follow. When he stops playing their little game, a door opens and he enters the main body of the ship. It’s got flashing lights, weird angles, and aliens walking around in it. Trip’s tripping. He’s seeing everything in slow motion at Batman-cam angles. They offer him food and rest, both of which he refuses. “I think…I’d like to take a look at that engine room of yours.” A female alien in a shiny silver catsuit leads Trip across the room. Along the way, he sees one of the aliens pass his hand over some contraption, sparks jumping between it and his hand. They pass windows beyond which is a tank full of giant eels swimming around in some transparent liquid. I would say water, but I’ve seen a later scene.

In the engine room, Trip and the alien babe are under the warp core giving it an oil change. Trip is still disoriented by the flashing lights and weird noises. She tries to show him the problem with the engine. “I’m sorry. You lost me. I’m having trouble concentrating.” She asks him if he’d like to take a rest after all.

On the Enterprise, Archer is enjoying a good book when Trip calls. “I don’t think I’m gonna be much help over here. I’m having a little more trouble adjusting than I thought I would.” Archer leaves Trip hanging and contacts the alien ship’s captain, who explains to Archer that Trip needs to rest to finish acclimating. “I strongly suggest he lie down for a while.” Archer believes the alien and orders Trip to take a nap. “Just one hour. If you’re not feeling better we’ll bring you back.” Trip doesn’t think it will help. The alien babe offers to show him to his sleeping quarters. Bucka-chicka-wow.

Trip wakes up some time later in a 60’s-style ergo-bed to the sound of ocean waves and the sight of the alien babe standing over him. I’ve had worse mornings. Every day of my life. “Your captain sent over the recording.” Trip asks about the stuff growing on the walls. “Our food. It grows all over the ship.” They must be a race of grazers. She offers Trip a bowl filled with clear, smooth stones. “This is the closest we could come to water,” she says. We call it, “Ice”. She puts the bowl down on Trip’s area and pops a water-rock into his mouth. He is not displeased. With the second one, sparks fly between Trip and the alien. Literally, they jump from her hand to his lips. “Did that hurt?’ she asks. “It’s kinda nice,” he replies. With each chunk of water she feeds him, she lets the sparks linger longer. Eventually, she decides it is time to get back to work on the engine. Pointing at the bowl of water-rocks, Trip asks, “Can we take some of those with us?”

T’Pol is on the Enterprise bridge, running down a checklist with Trip by radio. He keeps injecting fun factoids about the aliens and their ship. “They’ve got grass growing on the floor. Real grass. It’s even green.” She’s not having any of it. The engine is almost repaired. Archer observes that Trip sounds better, and Mayweather responds, “Before you know it, he’ll have that engine room running like a well-oiled machine.” Isn’t it a well-oiled machine already? The moving parts, anyway? The alien babe, whom I suppose I should have mentioned is an alien engineer babe, tells Trip, “It will take a while for the coils to regenerate. Come with me.” Only if we time it right. Sorry. I’ve been wanting to use that joke ever since I first heard it in 1982.

Trip and the alien babe enter an iridescent room. She walks over to a wall and picks up a remote control. She tells Trip, “Watch this,” and pushes some buttons. The room disappears and is replaced with an alien landscape. “This is Thera, where I come from.” Trip is suitably impressed. “It’s not like any hologram I’ve ever seen.” She scoops up some of the holographic dirt and pours it through his hands. Trip asks how it is possible. She explains, “Re-sequenced photons.” Oh, magic. Makes about as much sense. She points off into the virtual distance. “Come with me.” Again, so soon? After a short walk, she changes the scene to a rowboat on a calm lake somewhere. Trip is still impressed. “If we had one of these on Enterprise, I’d never ask for shore leave.” She asks him a couple, “You aliens are strange,” questions. She touches his cheek to feel his stubble, giving him a facial joy buzzer in the process. He likes it. In the race to see who can score with an alien chick first, Trip pulls into the lead previously held by Archer. She uses the remote to create a box full of white pebbles. “More water?” Trip asks. She tells him, “This is a game we play,” and sticks one hand into the pebbles. They and her arm start to glow. Trip follows suit, and before long they each have both hands in the mix, all purple and glowy. “Your favorite food is ‘cat fish’,” she announces, to Trip’s surprise. “What’s mine?” When he discovers he knows, she is pleased. “I wasn’t certain the granules would work with your species.” That’s not all that works with his species. They flirt until another voice breaks in. “Reactor room to A’Lenn.” Once again, like last week, no names until absolutely necessary. It’s time for them to go back to work. A’Lenn turns off the room.

Trip boards the shuttle back to the Enterprise, ready to tell some stories. Mayweather asks, “What are the Zerillians like?” “Oh, a little shorter than us, weird scales on their faces, but otherwise pretty much like you and me.” The Roddenberry Alien Design Policy, ladies and gents. Trip’s glad he went, but just as glad to be coming back.

On the bridge, the Zerillians are on the main screen thanking Archer for the help and apologizing for delaying the Enterprise’s mission. Hoshi got the video fixed. “Getting a chance to meet other species is our mission,” Archer assures them. Trip arrives on the bridge, and the aliens thank him, too, for all the trouble he went through. “It was worth every minute,” he tells them. The aliens warp away. Feeling all self-congratulatory, our heroes head off back where they were going before all this started.

Another morning, and Trip is in the galley scarfing down about five scrambled eggs as Reed sits down at his table. Reed is interested in the hologram room, which Trip goes on about. “If we had one of those on board, I can only imagine what it would be used for,” Reed observes, keenly aware of the human capacity to turn anything it gets its hands on into a sex toy given half a chance. Trip catches his drift. “I don’t know if they can recreate people with it, but it sure did a hell of a job on landscapes.” Reed then asks if Trip made any friends, and tries to turn that into a sex thing too. If the Internet rumors about Reed being gay are true, he’s deep in the closet, back with the old report cards and shoes from the Age of Disco. Trip’s wrist itches, and as he scratches it, he notices a little bump on it. Reed asks if Trip might be allergic to something, and suggests he have Dr. Phlox take a look.

“I don’t believe you’re having an allergic reaction,” Phlox tells Trip as he examines the wrist-bump. “Did your trip to the Zerillian ship involve any…romance?” Trip denies touching anything that didn’t generate a warp field, but Phlox knows biology doesn’t lie. Indicating the bump on Trip’s wrist, Phlox tells Trip, “This is a nipple.” He scans Trip and locates the embryo. “I‘m not quite sure if congratulations are in order, Commander, but you’re pregnant.” The look of puzzled disbelief on Trip’s face is a sight to behold.

Trip comes sliding out of the wall-mounted MRI machine to face Archer, Phlox, and T’Pol. Phlox points out the little bundle of joy on the scanner screen. “I assume you’ll be happy to know it is not, technically, your child.” It turns out Zerillians only pass along their mother’s genetic info to their young. The men are just incubators. Makes me wonder where the next generation of Zerillian men come from. Trip wants to know, “How the hell’d I get knocked up?” Phlox doesn’t know enough about Zerillian sex, “but I wouldn’t think it would be that difficult for you to recollect a…sexual encounter.” Trip vehemently denies screwing anything besides threaded fasteners. “I was a complete gentlemen the entire time.” T’Pol disapproves of Trip’s presumed behavior. I think she’s jealous. No, wait. That’s an emotion. Discussing A’Lenn, Trip claims, “I didn’t lay a hand on her.” He seems to have forgotten the sparky hands that got laid on him. Trip asks Phlox if there’s any way to remove the little bastard without hurting it. Phlox makes an impossible biological claim that translates as “Tough noogies.” Somehow, taking it out without worrying about hurting it never came up. Considering Trip’s ride in the holographic chamber to see A’Lenn’s home planet, T’Pol suggests, “Perhaps the next step would have been to meet her holographic parents. If I’m not mistaken, on some planets that’s a precursor to marriage.” Archer does all he can not to crack up when she says this. Who says Vulcans don’t have a sense of humor? Finally, Trip remembers the box of holographic telepathy pebbles. Phlox speculates wildly that maybe that had something to do with it. I’ve heard of the holodeck safety protocols going offline, but that’s ridiculous. T’Pol chides, “One of the first things a diplomat learns is not to stick his fingers where they don’t belong.” Archer orders T’Pol to track down the Zerillians to see if they can fix the trouble Trip’s gotten himself into. Trip is cleared to return to duty, but only if he sees Phlox once a day, because, “That nipple may not be the only surprise your body has in store for you.” Archer’s self-restraint is amazing. I know he’s going to leave sickbay, go back to his quarters, and gut-laugh until his kidneys shoot out his nose. Trip asks if his delicate condition can be kept among the four of them. “Of course,” Archer agrees, meaning, “Of course, until I can transmit a letter to the Reader’s Digest people.”

In Engineering, Trip is getting all maternal. As he’s getting off the little one-man person lifter, he notices that the guardrail around the shaft would offer no protection to “a short alien, a child.” He points this out to a passing subordinate, who has no idea what his boss is going on about. Trip also notices that if someone inside the elevator had his hands on the handrail, “it’ll take your fingers right off.” This is a real safety concern, the kind of thing I’m surprised the set designers got away with, but Engineer Lackey just doesn’t get it. Trip realizes how weird he just got and tells the other guy, “Never mind.”

It’s eight days later, and still no sign of the Zerillians. Trip, in his civvies (untucked shirt pulling duty as a maternity dress), walks through the galley on his way to the captain’s mess. He looks over the gathered crewmen and, in his shame over his love child, paranoidly (is that a word?) believes they are all talking about him. He enters the captain’s mess, where Archer and Phlox are already eating. I thought T’Pol ate with the captain. Maybe she and Phlox alternate, since there doesn’t seem to be a fourth chair at the table. “I thought we all promised to keep this under wraps,” Trip says by way of a question. When the other two deny saying anything, Trip concludes T’Pol must have told. “She probably let it slip the minute she left sickbay.” Phlox reminds Trip she also promised to keep the secret. “Where I’m from, Vulcans aren’t known for keeping promises.” I’m starting to think there’s more to his anti-Vulcanism than the usual dislike and distrust all humans have. Either that or it’s the only character trait they’ve nailed down for him yet. As Trip is laying claim to an entire pan of chicken tetrazini, Archer notices a bandage on Trip’s wrist. “Did you cut yourself?” Trip has put a bandage on his wrist to cover both the nipple from the earlier scene and a new one, complete with areola. “Just how many of these am I gonna grow, and, while we’re on the subject, are they gonna go away afterward?” Phlox, speaking from a confident ignorance, assures Trip that they probably ought to go away, eventually, at some point, maybe. When Archer points out that maybe they won’t be able to find the Zerillians, Trip takes the first logical step. “Are you saying I’m gonna deliver this baby?” Phlox nudges him to take the second step. “Once the child is born, it may well rely on you, in some way, to care for it.” He hasn’t gotten it yet. “I never had any intention of becoming a working mother.” As Archer suffers the torment of laughter contained, Phlox tells Trip he can expect various changes over the next five weeks, “hormonal changes, mostly.” Archer suggests Trip stick with the civvies “to help hide the bulge.” Trip, having inhaled his food, calls in the steward to bring him another serving. Archer orders Trip to start seeing the doctor every eight hours so he can “start figuring out what your post-natal responsibilities might be.” Trip finally lifts his metaphorical foot to take that second step when Phlox pushes him over. “You may very well be putting those nipples to work before you know it.” Of course, this is the exact moment the steward returns with Trip’s second helping. Trip yanks the food from his hand, and the poor guy staggers away, uncomprehending, but determined to become an officer one day. Archer tells Trip to look at the bright side. “This is the first interspecies pregnancy involving a…human.” Trip is not brightened.

Meanwhile, on the bridge, Reed spots the Zerillians with the sensors. T’Pol orders the course change and informs the captain. Oh, there she is. Now I wonder who drives the ship on the nights when she eats with Archer. Trip, hearing the announcement, is suitably relieved. Looking toward Heaven, or up anyway, he gushes, “Thank you!” They rush out of the mess toward the bridge, Trip grabbing a handful of breadsticks on the way.

They arrive at the location their sensors say the Zerillian ship is, but instead they discover a ship their Vulcan database tells them is a Klingon battlecruiser. It has the design of the original series ships, but the detail of modern special effects. It looks good. Bigger than I thought, too.

T’Pol has a theory, which she uses as an opportunity to insult Trip. “It appears your repairs didn’t last very long. If I’m correct, they’re hiding in the Klingons’ plasma wake.” I also have a theory. The Zerillians go around getting aliens to come on board by pretending to be disabled, then impregnate them with their demonic seed and send them away to spread their malefic influence across the galaxy. My other theory is that Zerillians are sluts with a bad quality control department in their space program. Archer decides he has to deal with the Klingons in order to get in touch with the Zerillians. He hails them, and they start firing photon torpedoes. Typical. While T’Pol convinces Archer that that’s just the Klingon way of saying “Howdy,” Trip scans the Klingons. “Sir, look at their starboard nacelle. The power’s fluctuating just like ours did.” Looks like the Klingons have a nasty case of Zerillian barnacles.

The Klingons finally respond. “What gives you the right to approach a Klingon warship?” It’s a good mixture of threatening and prideful. Very in character. Archer starts by apologizing. Rookie mistake. He asks them, “Have you been experiencing any unusual malfunctions? The Klingon assumes Enterprise has been following them. Archer digs the hole deeper by explaining, “Your problems are being caused by a small stealth vessel that’s been riding in your wake.” Good going, Archie. The Klingons do the same ignite-the-plasma trick and catch the Zerillians in a tractor beam. “Bring their captain to me, and execute the others,” orders the Klingon-in-charge. Apparently, plasma-surfing in an invisible ship and making a Klingon ship veer right in the process is an act of war against Klingons. Of course, surrendering while lying face down in the blood of your own family is an act of war against a Klingon. Archer tries to convince the Klingons not to kill anybody, and gets nowhere at warp 6. T’Pol steps forward. “Less than one month ago, Captain Archer stood in the High Council Chamber in Kronos.” She summarizes the pilot episode at them, ending by basically saying, “You owe him one.” That gets them thinking. Trip throws in a bribe. “They have some amazing technology. If you don’t kill ‘em I’m sure they’d share it with you.” Or you can kill them, take the ship, and retro-engineer it yourselves. Trip specifically recommends the holodeck tech. The Klingons are intrigued. “If you agree to enter their vessel, I’d appreciate it if you took my chief engineer with you,” Archer requests. They aren’t that intrigued. Captain Klingon sees no benefit to himself in taking Trip along. Archer and Trip try to explain why Trip needs to go to the Zerillian ship without revealing the bun in Trip’s oven, but eventually, they have no choice. “Show him,” Archer orders. Trip raises his shirt to show the bulge to the Klingons. They laugh. That’s good, right?

Must be. The next scene starts with two Klingons and Trip stepping out of the “decompression” chamber. Trip explains to the Zerillian captain. “[The Klingons have] agreed to consider releasing your ship in exchange for one or two of your holographic simulators. It would be a good idea to cooperate.” One Klingon holds up a data chip thingy. “This is a topographical survey of our capital.” The Zerillian takes the Klingons off to demonstrate the holodeck, leaving Trip with A’Lenn. She claims the reactor broke after six days. I still say they wanted to sow their dark seed in the Klingons. She asks Trip why the Enterprise tracked them down, and he shows her the baby bulge. She acts surprised. “I had no idea this could happen with another species.” So, she admits tricking Trip into having alien sex with her. “I would be real appreciative if you could get this out of me. Assuming it’s safe.” She points her TV remote at it and declares, “It’s still early enough to transfer the embryo to another host.” Oh, and it’s a girl.

The Klingons are impressed with the holographic representation of their homeworld. “I can see my house from here.” Oh, my God, I laughed and laughed. The Klingons get a holodeck and agree to release the Zerillians. But don’t think that means the Klingons are going to be all buddy-buddy now. “Listen carefully to me,” the Klingon captain tells Archer. “Our debt is repaid. We have no interest in meeting you again. And if we do, I promise you’ll regret it.”

Denouement: Archer, Trip, and T’Pol are eating dinner. Trip is good-naturedly griping about decompressing with the Klingons. “I smelled things in there I hope I never smell again.” Archer, without prompting, tells Trip that the Zerillians will get home in a month under their own power rather than risking hitching with anyone else. He then asks T’Pol if all the nice things she said about him when she was talking to the Klingons are true. “Klingons are known to exaggerate. I saw nothing wrong with doing the same,” she tells him, bursting is ego-bubble. Then, not having made enough people feel bad that day, she tells Trip, “You might be pleased to know that this is the first recorded incident of a human male becoming pregnant.” “Just how I always wanted to get into the history books.”

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