Unexpected

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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!