Unexpected

After a few poor episodes my interest was beginning to waver a bit but this episode pulled me right back in. It's got a lot of things that have made Star Trek great over the years: space jargon, encountering new species, a bit of humor, an unexpected twist.

The Xyrillians are a fun, peaceful new race with great technology. I was a little confused as to why they needed Trip to fix their ship, even though they are far more technologically advanced than the humans, but no matter. It's also fun seeing humans encounter other species for the first time, unaware of customs or even how that species' sexual intercourse works.

This was a great episode for getting some more character development for Trip and really the first great ST: Enterprise episode overall.

"Unexpected" is the first really good episode of "Star Trek: Enterprise"...something the show really needed after a couple rather weak episodes.

The show begins with the humans discovering a strange cloaked ship hiding in their wake. These aliens were harmless and friendly and Trip agrees to go to their ship to help them repair their warp engines. Here is a neat detail--he could not just beam over or even go directly aboard by shuttle. It seems that the pressure and atmosphere were so different that Trip needed to go through a length 'acclamation' process.

Following this odd process, things seemed to go very well aboard the Xyrillian vessel. Trip particularly enjoyed his time spent with a female engineer. However, what he didn't realize (especially since they never appeared to have sex) is that he became pregnant due to this contact!! This is only discovered later and Enterprise spends several days looking for the Xyrillians trying to figure out what to do with Trip and his 'predicament'!

This episode has TONS going for it. In addition to the cool acclamation process, the show features a great meeting with the Klingons, the BEST dialog from T'Pol you'll ever hear as well as a great sense of humor. Terrific....and an episode you'll never forget!

It's a shame that this episode was so intent on mocking the character of Tucker when he was unknowingly and accidentally impregnated while on a mission to an alien space ship. The "male pregnancy" jokes were off-colour even in 2001 but by 2022, when trans women are leading the search for the Holy Grail of a freshly transplanted uterus, absolutely nothing is off the table (so to speak). And no-one, least of all a mere Birthing Person like myself, would dare to joke about it.

I didn't think I'd be able to watch Unexpected all the way through this time but I wanted to check out the alien environment again. Sure enough, it felt like so much more than the usual Earth type atmosphere/gravity/vegetation plus forehead-of-the-week. We were treated to some truly original thinking with the strange environment aboard the alien ship. With its vegetable walls, iridescent, scaled inhabitants and organic-looking controls it reminded me of some of the earliest Science Fiction Classics like Perelandra and the Martian Way. Such a pity that all that creativity was put to the service of such an embarrassingly stupid plot.

Lovely actress Julianne Christie manages to telegraph a certain allure despite being covered from head to toe in a reptilian skin. I think this is because of her sinuous, almost balletic, movements which throw into an unfortunate contrast the wooden deportment of our resident Vulcan Science Officer. Poor Ms Blalock was still unsure of her role at this stage and appears to have misinterpreted her instruction to look aloof as necessitating the posture of a dress shop mannequin being rolled around on the warehouse trolley. The Klingons got into the story somewhere but I'd long since lost interest by then.

Senior Trekker scores every episode with a 5.

Enterprise encounters a cloaked ship following them and Trip Tucker pays them a visit.

I did quite enjoy this one because it captured the spirit of the original series with Trip's interaction with with the Xyrillians. You could imagine James T Kirk in this situation and how funny it would have been if he had suffered the same outcome. That would have taught him not to put it about so much throughout the galaxy.

On the other hand it does have some issues. In a plot where the essential premise is someone hosting a parasitic life-form you can go two ways, horror (like Alien) where you can get into all sorts of morals and themes, or humour. The writers chose the latter, but unfortunately the humour is not quite nailed on for me. It seems quite forced at time with Tucker pretty much doing an impression of a hormonal pregnant woman and having all the jokes centred around that. Some of them don't make sense, like the notion of a Vulcan indulging in idle gossip with other crew members.

We do start to get to explore the characters a bit more in this one. There is a reasonably good encounter with the Klingons with a decent moment for T'Pol, but Jolene Blalock as of yet hasn't rally put her own stamp on the show's Vulcan character. Leonard Nimoy was so good at showing his repressed emotions in facial expressions and Tim Russ had the opportunity to display some comic and dramatic range. I hope she gets to do more than just blandly deliver lines and pout.

Archer isn't as gung-ho or tetchy in this one as he was in the previous few episodes, his standout moment being the shower scene as the gravity system fails. Tucker is the star of this episode and Connor Trinner does his best to elevate the script to be fairly entertaining.

It's a 6.5/10 for me but I round upwards.

I liked Julie Christie, but watching this "Enterprise" segment I adore Julianne. The obscure actress (the only other program I've seen her in was "Joe Pickett") is absolutely terrific as a reptilian skinned alien who gets a wee bit too romantic with Trip in this humorous and downright sexy episode.

The script by Berman & Braga strikes a nice balance between making fun of Trip's very odd predicament while also including a tense standoff with Klingons as well as a very interesting "wonder" encounter with Julianne's race, as the Enterprise crew kindly helps them with a power problem on their ship.