After assisting with repairs on an alien's vessel, the captain and Tucker visit his home on a desert planet for a meal of thanks. However, they quickly find themselves in the middle of a war.

If you want an episode that does exactly what it says on the tin, this would be it. Our boys trundle on down to a planet, play a game that looks suspiciously like lacrosse but with a swirly green blob for a ball, then spend the rest of the story wandering about in the desert. Nothing makes much sense here. The encampment Archer and Trip are in might be under attack, but that's no reason to go running blindly into a desert without knowing your way around. Considering they go back to the shuttlepod for supplies, it's a mystery why they don't pick up adequate supplies of water, as they're carrying next to nothing for their long trek.

Then there's the ongoing puzzle of this kind of story: how come Archer is more or less fine while Tucker is dehydrated and about to slip into a coma? They both had a canteen of water and they've both been doing exactly the same things so why is one so much more feeble than the other? And that's it for the episode. The Enterprise crew attempts to locate their missing shipmates and with minimal help from the alien they assisted earlier, they're through the planetary defence grid and easily able to track Archer and Trip. There's no sub-plot, there's no chance to develop the relationship between the captain and engineer because they spend all their time being shot at or slipping in and out of consciousness and there's no twist in the tale whatsoever. With the alien referring to his struggle as having been called terrorism, there's at least a chance for some kind of moralistic element here, but even that is glossed over for the sake of some trudging and things blowing up.

I could have written this while asleep; how did it get as far as production? We're getting near the end of the season and the writers should be getting a better handle on characters and story by this point, not worse.

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