Unexpected

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.

As Archer and the gang head through space, things seem screwed up on the Enterprise. It seems that a cloaked ship is tailgating them and drawing power from them. The aliens seem to be benevolent enough but need work on their engines. Trip is chosen to go over there on a shuttle (transportation is in its earliest stages) and needs to go through a kind of decompression (like a deep sea diver) that takes three hours. Once on board he needs to rest and then hooks up with an interesting female alien engineer. There is a little spark between them (mostly some flirting), but when Trip gets back to the Enterprise, some interesting things begin happening. This is also the first encounter with Klingon warriors. Quite a good offering from a greatly underrated series.

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.

The episode that introduces the concept of the holodeck. It is part of Xyrillian technology.

Trip encounters it when he heads to a Xyrillian ship to repair their warp drive. He charms Ah'Len, a Xyrillian who shows him their holodeck.

When Trip returns to the Enterprise, he finds that he is growing a nipple in his arm. It turns that Ah'Len got him pregnant.

Now they have to find the Xyrillian ship and somehow deal with the potential offspring. Only Captain Archer has to deal with the Klingons as well.

This was meant to be a comedic story, on male pregnancy and unexpected alien encounters.

It was badly written drivel. There is a line where the Klingon commander claims to see his house as he walks on the holodeck.

In fact it was an episode where no one keeps their mouths shut. Archer places the Xyrillians in danger as they were following the Klingon ship by stealth. Tripp talking openly about their holdeck to the Klingons.

That is before going all about the pregnancy nonsense. The Enterprise crew poking fun at Tripp for doing his own bit of poking. Maybe it should had delved into the body horror of an alien pregnancy without getting too joky.

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.