Unexpected

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.

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.

"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!

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.

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.