Seeking a means to protect Enterprise from Expanse anomalies, Archer picks up a young slave girl who is desperate to escape, but she isn’t what she seems.

There’s something wrong with this that’s difficult to pinpoint, but it’s connected to the idea of an ongoing story arc. Every other show manages to construct a coherent episode with a beginning, middle and end around moving the overall story forward; this just has a few ideas it would like to slip it, and it doesn’t seem to matter who, what, where, why or how. It’s all very strange and quite random. It’s only when it ends that you wonder what happened to the actual story; all that’s here is a lot of fighting – hand-to-hand and phaser – and an attractive woman collecting data on various members of the Enterprise crew. It’s only really in the staging of the fights that there’s anything worth watching in the episode, as at least these are more interesting and pacy.

It seems that someone’s idea of ongoing plotting is to bring up the same thing time and time again; once more Trip’s there with his shirt off in T’Pol’s quarters within the first few minutes, and we’re swiftly treated to the sight of Bakula showing off his chest in Sickbay where it’s briefly mentioned that he’s recovering from his transformation from last episode and it might take some time. Remember Picard’s recovery from being a Borg? It took years! Episodes were devoted to it. People had ideas and got into the characters’ heads and really did some fleshing out. Here it’s ‘Well, it’ll be a few days’. Jeez!

I like the idea of the alien ‘council’ appearing every few episodes, but exactly what do they want? Did they send the probe to Earth? If so, why not finish the job? Enterprise is one ship with 84 people on it; the Xindi have destroyed continents! Is there a relevance to the multiple species of Xindi? Is there anything remotely interesting planned at all? It’s not building a plot, it’s just the same thing said in a new way.

Meanwhile, Rajiin, the woman Archer ‘rescues’ has nothing to her. Her whole background turns out to be a lie, and thus she’s just a means to an end. The actress playing her has no emotional range whatsoever (it’s becoming a worrying trend for female characters in this show), meaning her alleged concerns for Archer ring false. The semi-lesbian nuances are desperate and quite pathetic, especially in the case of her encounter with Hoshi, which seems to be very quickly cut out of because it’s going so poorly. Even T’Pol is written wrongly; her experiments boosting Enterprise’s shielding with Trip show her as extremely over-emotional for a Vulcan, and when Rajiin comes to her quarters she has ample time to call security, or get up and fight, or simply move, yet chooses to do none of these.

For the second time in four episodes someone is dumped in the brig where Archer does some threatening, and the Enterprise is boarded; it’s getting very tiresome to have the same set-up every week. You can see why it keeps happening in the case of Security though, whose reaction to an alien weapon is to look at it until they get zapped, possibly killed. The number of idiots on board is truly incredible; Trip sits and waits for something to explode when it would have killed him, and everything seems to slip by Security until it bites them in the ass! They deserve to be wiped out, and if the final fate of Enterprise is that it was lost in the Delphic Expanse and never returned, that’s just fine by me.

**

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