• Home Board 2 June 27 - 5:31 am

Enterprise comes home, and T'Pol goes home to Vulcan to get married. Another episode title in the tradition of multiple meanings.

I wonder if we'll see that trench dug in Florida being filled in.

They said she already had a husband in "Bounty."

Um, "benn", could you find another username? I've been using "Benn" for the last three years or thereabout here. I wouldn't want us to be confused with one another. I especially don't want anyone thinking that I'm suddenly watching this show when I gave up on it back during its first season.

Live long and prosper.

Awww, comeon, Benn, we know its you and you just can't stay away from the Trek. Your addicted man, admit it

He can quit any time he wants to, Merat. Really!

BIZARRE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE WEEK:
>> HOLY KRAP!! PHLOX HAS AN INFLATABLE HEAD! What more needs to be said???!! Wow! I laughed hard.

AMAZING DIPLOMACY OF THE WEEK:
>> Reed tells Phlox that an Andorian was attacked on Earth. Now I know Enterprise is making progress with the Andorians, but I didn't think relations were so good that Andorians were visiting Earth.

COHERENT DREAM OF THE WEEK:
>> The "waking dream" is a common theme in Star Trek, but it always amazes me how coherent the dreams of some characters can be. Archer's hallucination with the Xindi-Reptilians is a prime example.

CONTRADICTORY VULCAN OF THE WEEK:
Koss tells T'Pol that he wants her to be happy.
1. If she doesn't want to marry him, why wouldn't he respect that if he wants her to be happy.
2. Happiness is an emotion. Wanting a Vulcan to be happy would probably be an insult.

FORGOTTEN AILMENT OF THE WEEK:
The writers miss the most obvious reason for T'Pol's mother being asked to leave from the Science Academy: her Pa'Nar Syndrome. In "Stigma" it was established to be a disease that carried the eponymous stigma. Granted, the incident at P'Jem is always valid, but it seems like a missed opportunity.

UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE WEEK:
Tucker tells T'Les that he first felt an attraction to T'Pol when they had their first argument. Given that their first argument was the infamous decon-chamber scene in "Broken Bow," that's certainly an understatement given that Tucker's "attraction" was very noticeable at the end of their argument.

NEEDED TWO-PARTER OF THE WEEK:
This episode really should have been in two parts. I really liked what I saw, but it felt sort of rushed.

NICE TWIST OF THE WEEK:
I was really expecting to see Tucker interrupt the wedding at the end. So now we have T'Pol married to Koss even though she'll remain on Enterprise. That's very interesting.

INTERESTING LOVE INTEREST OF THE WEEK:
I liked Captain Hernandez. She had good chemistry with Archer, and it was nice that she was able to bring out feelings that he hasn't really shared with anyone else. It was really nice to see Archer acknowledge his changes.


MISSING ITEMS OF THE WEEK:
Things I would have liked to have seen:
1. Hernandez mentioning that the Columbia's first mission would be to bring a new warp coil to the stranded ship from "Damage."
2. A look at how Florida and other areas are dealing with the Xindi swath. Are they filling it in, making it a memorial area, etc?
3. What was Starfleet's reaction to the Temporal Cold War and Archer's Nazi adventure.
4. What happened to the Xindi that Archer befriended at the end of "Zero Hour"?

OVERALL OPINION OF THE WEEK:
The missing elements don't detract too much from the episode. The episode still feels rushed. I wish it had been two parts instead of "Storm Front." This is still the best episode to come out of Enterprise in a long time in terms of characterization, plot, dialogue, and social commentary. This would have made a tremendously superior season premiere. Kudos all around.
Grade A
(Some points off for the rushed nature but the points get added back for the Puffer-Phlox!)

See ya later
TUE

Didn't like the plot with Archer and his old flame, and I didn't like the C-plot with Phlox's misadventures on Earth, but the A-plot... that was a winner, folks. Knowing that Trip was letting T'Pol get married, even when it went against everything she wanted, made for a great ending. Trip wanted to learn about Vulcan culture... and boy, did he.

Could the reception have looked any more fake? And why on Earth was the shuttle parked in between the podium and the audience? And why wasn't there a MACO representative on the podium?

Wasn't Phlox nearly assimilated in "Regeneration"? Why didn't his self-defence mechanism kick in then?

Trip and T'Pol have to get up at 0400 to prepare a meal? When the Vulcans have food synthesizers?

Phlox has been through a lot for the head-puff to first show itself during a bar brawl. It was pretty cool but when I first saw it I thought he looked like Lisa Simpson.

Does the female captain cause any problems with TOS history? I guess no more than a starship called Enterprise. Never mind.

Overall good episode.

Well...another Jump The Shark moment.
The T & Aers got robbed - again; and Commander Jack@$$ was made to _look_ like a jack@$$, big time. Can you say: "YOU GOT PUNK'D! YOU GOT PUNK'D!", boys and girls?
T'Mom was pretty hot looking, though; guess that's where Subcommander Kes-With-Hooters...got the hooters.
No mention of next week's show this time; hated to p!$$ off Luigi Novi about this one.
And that's all I got to say about that.

Does the female captain cause any problems with TOS history? Clint X

I don't think so; the only reason we have to suspect otherwise is Lester's comment in "Turnabout Intruder," and she was juuuuuuuuuuuust a bit crazy, so I think it can be easily resolved.

Hmmm... a starship captain that climbs rocks for recreation, a trip to Vulcan for a wedding, and Starfleet officers in a barroom brawl while on shore leave. Looks like someone spun the big "Wheel O' Trek Plots" and went with whatever the counters landed on. That said, it was an improvement over the Nazi plot, but I too wish this story had been a two-parter as well. Archer climbed a mountain, restarted a relationship, had a disturbing dream...and what? Same for Phlox, he was warned of predjudice, experienced predjudice, withdrew...and what? Though real life is not always so neatly resloved, I would have liked to see more time spent with these themes. T'Pol's story was developed well without being too much like you-know-who's story. Good continuity on the Vulcan culture, hand salute, meditation, Kal-i-fee, the wedding opening, etc. Overall? 8.5 out of 10.

Could the reception have looked any more fake?

It looked so horribly fake I assumed it was one of the characters (most likely Archer) dreaming, then he'd wake up and the real reception or whatever would be something much smaller or less fun or something. It was really obvious the whole thing, including the audience, was CGI, and not even good CGI at that. More like bad CGI from a 7 year old video game. Must be the budget cuts...

Does the female captain cause any problems with TOS history? I guess no more than a starship called Enterprise. Never mind.

I was wondering when Starfleet became a boys club. Another changed premise. In Amok Time(TOS), T'Pau expresses surprise at the presence of Kirk and McCoy, asking "Are our ceremonies for outworlders?" Here, nobody raises an eyebrow at Tucker's presence at the wedding. Of course, he did take the trouble to dress native.

Ms. Cassidy seemed to balance emotion and logic fairly well, seeming close to (what I think is) the Vulcan ideal.

Also, though the 9/11 preaching was a bit blatant, I liked the fact that the events of the Xindi arc have had a lasting effect.

Archer's soul searching was very well done, particularly his "I was trying to get away from you" moment, where he realizes the price he paid to save Earth from the Xindi.

Archer seems to think that humans going out & exploring led to the Xindi attack, but I thought the Xindi attack was caused by the Sphere Builders trying to eliminate a future enemy.

Trip didn't seem to be too bothered by Vulcan's thinner atmosphere.

Is this the first episode to establish Vulcan as being 16 light years from Earth?

Well, where were you when we needed you in Fight or Flight, buddy?
Great Line: “You fly all around space, telling every species you meet where to find Earth. Did it ever occur to you that might not be the smartest thing to do?” –The disgruntled bar patron to Reed, Travis and Phlox in the closing scene of Act 2.

---Critique:
---Pretty good episode that mixes aftermath and new story material and hits all the right notes on all three story threads.
---This is how the fourth season should’ve started, with actual stories that moved the series premise forward and revealed character. The anti-alien and anti-Starfleet sentiment we saw in the closing scene of Act 2 is EXACTLY what I’ve been waiting for ever since the series premiered. Hoshi’s reaction to Phlox’s decision not to visit Earth in Act 4 was the most sincere example of assertiveness on her part we’ve seen on the series thus far, and it was great. I also liked the guilt Archer felt over how what he did in the Expanse, the crewmen he lost, and his uncertainty of what Starfleet’s role should be, and how reasonable it comes off. This is what stories should be: plots that don’t merely consist of pointless battles or inert scenes that could be presented in any order, but events that actually affect the characters. Here, the Reptilian dream sequence and his romance with Hernandez came off not as gratuitous, but as sincere extensions of his fears.
---Scenes like this one and the one in the bar with Phlox work so well because the characters don’t know that in a hundred years or so, space exploration is taken for granted. To them, Earth is still a new player in the interstellar playing field, and after all that’s happened on Earth, the uncertainty felt by both its civilians and Starfleet seems perfectly reasonable. Archer’s confession to Hernandez about having “lost something out there” in Act 3, and seeing her as he was three years ago was dead-on. That the Xindi attack had nothing to do with Archer giving Earth’s location in episodes like Fight or Flight is beside the point; public perception is often at odds with facts, and this episode shows how Starfleet cannot always tiptoe through the raindrops of public opinion indefinitely. This is prime stuff, because it shows that just because the Xindi arc is over doesn’t mean that its effects are, and if what happened in episodes like The Expanse continue to have repercussions, then Enterprise will have truly struck the formula it should always have had from the get-go, and surpassed Voyager. This sort of continuity value is echoed in other parts of the episode as well, as we are still seeing payoff from episodes like Breaking the Ice, The Andorian Incident, and Harbinger, and I for one, like it. The T’Pol-Trip-Koss triangle comes off not as a corny soap opera, but a legitimate execution of characterization where the characters are not acting like goofy cutouts, and I’m guessing that Trip and T’Pol’s feelings for one another, will lead to a stronger relationship, but remain tragically unrequited.
---Even the future-references, like T’Les’ admonitions to T’Pol about the shame that would be incurred by the children of a human and a Vulcan, and Archer’s mention of the Captain Jefferies, were subtle rather than obvious. Well done!

---Notes:
---We learn from Archer’s speech in the teaser that the number of crewmen killed during the year-long Xindi storyline was 27.
---This episode marks the first appearance of Commander Williams since Broken Bow. We also learn that Andorians and Rigellians have begun visiting Earth, as Reed mentions to Phlox in Act 1. Hernandez indicated to Archer in Act 3 that another Warp 5 Starfleet ship is operational, presumably the Columbia mentioned in E².
---This episode also marks the series’ first appearance of Vulcan (the first such exterior shots of it since Persistence of Vision(VOY)), and the first appearance of T’Pol’s fiancé Koss since he was mentioned in Breaking the Ice. We also learn, for the first time, exactly how distant Vulcan is from Earth, when Trip mentions in the opening scene of Act 4 that it is 16 light years away. We learn that in Vulcan culture, house guests are expected to prepare the morning meal. This episode also establishes that stasis technology, in addition to medicinal applications, is also used by Vulcans to keep food fresh, which I’ve long suspected. We learn that the principle leader on Vulcan, like Bajor, is referred to as the First Minister. And we see a Vulcan wedding for the first time ever.
---We learn in the last scene of Act 2 that Denobulans can inflate their faces like a puffer fish, presumably a defensive gesture.

---Continuity Nods:
Archer mentions to Hernandez in the second scene of Act 1 that he had an argument with one of the designers of the NX class, whom he names as Captain Jefferies, no doubt named after original series art director Matt Jefferies, after whom Jefferies tubes were named. Whereas we know whom the tubes were named after externally, we can now surmise the internal character after whom they were named.

---Terms:
Captain Erika Hernandez Old friend of Archer’s who first meets him n the episode in the bar in Act 1. She has at least one brother, as she mentions in the second scene of Act 2. The second scene of Act 4 establishes that they were once involved, and that Archer ended the relationship because he felt it was inappropriate because he was her superior officer. She also mentions in this scene that there is only one other Warp 5 starship, and that she is the captain of it. Since Travis told Commander Ryan in the Mess Hall in Act 2 of Fortunate Son that there were actually three on the drawing board, presumably Hernandez meant that only one was operational, and hers may be the Columbia mentioned in E². (Name from startrek.com only.)
Pulsed phase cannons One of the upgrades to the Enterprise that Archer notices when inspecting the repairs on the bridge in the second scene of Act 1.
Captain Jefferies One of the designers of the NX class, with whom Archer tells in the second scene of Act 1 he had an argument because he didn’t want to be in command of a warship making contact with new species.
Mount Tar’hana Volcano on Vulcan which still experiences frequent eruptions, as Trip and T’Pol mention in the opening shot of Act 2.
fire plains Topographical feature found on Vulcan, as Trip mentions in the opening shot of Act 2.
T’Les T’Pol’s mother, whom we first see in the opening scene of Act 2. (Name from startrek.com only.)
Na’ru vines Plants found on the grounds of T’Les’ home, which T’Pol mentions in the third scene of Act 2 have bloomed early this year, and to which T’Les says she has had ample time to attend.
gespar Vulcan food eaten by T’Les, T’Pol and Trip for breakfast in the third scene of Act 2, which T’Les says is not fresh because her stasis unit is not working properly.
stasis unit Househld appliance for keeping food fresh.
food synthesizer Household appliance that T’Les asks Trip to fix in the opening scene of Act 3.
Polaris Alpha Ursae Minoris, the bright star closest to the north celestial pole, also known as the North Star, the Lode Star, or the Pole star, 431 light years (132 parsecs) from Earth. Archer tells Hernandez in Act 3 that the planet they explored in Strange New World was “just to the left” of where they are on the mountain.
First Minister Presumably the principle leader of Vulcan, whom T’Les mentions to T’Pol in Act 3. T’Les tells T’Pol that the First Minister at the time of the P’Jem Incident was dismissed over that incident.
Madame Chang’s Chinese restaurant Hoshi was hoping to go to with Phlox because Phlox had been talking about its egg drop soup for some time, as she mentions in Act 4.
Command Council Starfleet body in front of which Archer is debriefed in the episode, which Commander Williams names in Act 4.

No reference to next week's show???? Had almost beat into me about Brent Spiner 'coming aboard' the Enterprise for a three story arc that will affect the relation between the Klingons and the 'Federation.' Came up just about every break.

What?

No time-travel?

Is this the first episode to establish Vulcan as being 16 light years from Earth?

This lends credence to the (non-canon) Tech Manual stating that Vulcan orbits 40 Eridani. 40 Eridani is less than 16.5 ly from earth.

Whoops, I meant "Epsilon Eridani", which is 10.5 ly from Earth.

How does it lend credence if Trip said 16, and Epsilon Eridani is 10.5?

This episode marks the first appearance of Commander Williams since Broken Bow." -- Luigi Novi

I don't have tapes to double check, but I could swear that Williams has appeared in other episodes. I think he may have been in "Shadows of P'Jem," "Shockwave, Part 2," or "The Expanse."

Archer seems to think that humans going out & exploring led to the Xindi attack, but I thought the Xindi attack was caused by the Sphere Builders trying to eliminate a future enemy." -- Keith Allan Morgan.

Well, if the Enterprise had never gone out to explore the galaxy, the Federation probably never would have been formed. With no Federation, the Spherebuilders would not have perceived Earth as a threat. Granted, the expanding expanse would have destroyed Earth, but that's another issue.

TUE

benn: They said she already had a husband in "Bounty."

I thought that T'Pol just said that she had a fiance, or was supposed to marry Kos at some point, not that they were married. Of course, Vulcan betrothals could be akin to human betrothal in ancient times where you were as good as married you just hadn't had the formal ceremony or were living together.

Sparrow47: Could the reception have looked any more fake?

Agreed - the CGI effects were pretty cheesy. And what was with the stadium in the middle of San Francisco Bay?

While we're on the subject of returning home, why has no one yet explained why the Xindi Reptilians found only one orbiting station around Earth - and merely a science research station at that - when obviously there should have been spacedocks and defense stations and the like. That bit from last season still bugs me like an itch that won't go away...

Sparrow47:Trip and T'Pol have to get up at 0400 to prepare a meal?

Yeah, and did you notice how the Vulcan Sun was well up when they sat down to eat? Let's assume that time runs pretty close to the same on Vulcan. How lousy cooks are Trip and T'Pol if it takes them over two hours to prepare breakfast?

(OK, OK, T'Pol's house could be towards one of the poles of the planet where the Sun comes up earlier at certain times of the year, assuming a tilting axis of rotation like Earth's. Heck, when I was in Ireland two summers ago, the Sun went down around 10:45pm and came back up at 3:45 or so!)

SCSON: How did this episode jump the shark? I think it did just the opposite. If anything jumped the shark, it was the first two eps of this season where Trek once again trotted out Nazis as bad guys, and mashed together so many bits from other Trek episodes and movies.

Luigi Novi:This is what stories should be...events that actually affect the characters.

Absolutely right, Luigi: this was the strength of the original series, and the strength of every good episode of Star Trek since. This is what made/makes Farscape one of the finest hours of television, and - despite more than occasional bouts of terrible dialogue - this was also what made Babylon 5 so good.

I, too, would have liked to have seen the three storylines explored in more depth, as well as a little more about the repercussions of the Xindi attack on Earth - how Florida and South America are faring, more than a simplistic bar brawl to explore the rising xenophobia, etc.

I did, however, like that the writer and producers decided to go a complicated route with Trip and T'Pol. As the final moments ticked away and T'Pol approached Kos, I really expected to see a "To be continued" as we fade to black, but that's not what happened, and Data's great-great-great grandfather appears over the next three episodes, so I don't think there's going to be some reset button where T'Pol magically gets out of marrying Kos and throws herself into Trip's arms. Which is great stuff as the two characters wrestle with their emotions (well, at least one of them will) and question just what their relationship is and will be.

I guess I relate to the whole thing because I was in a similar situation to Trip's: I was gaga over someone at seminary who I thought was gaga over me, but it turned out she had a "skeleton in the closet" in that she still had a thing for this guy she'd dated briefly while working on Wall Street. Long story short: she ended up getting back with the guy, he proposed, she accepted, I was a groomsman in the wedding (though I didn't agree with her marrying the guy), and now they have two kids and live in a 4,000 square foot home waaaaaay west of NYC where he commutes to Wall Street every day.

Since then, I met a woman who makes my friend from seminary pale by comparison, and we've been ecstatically married for three years November. The seminary friend and I have been very close, and she was even in my wedding.

So, I'm thinking one of two things will happen with Trip and T'Pol. Either TPTB will have some magic out for T'Pol to end her marriage and hook up again with Trip, or the two of them will struggle hard, maybe shed some tears (but not clothes, please!) and in the end forge an amazingly strong and deep friendship. I'd like to see that route, and to for Trip to meet someone whom he will fall even more head-over-heels for than T'Pol. I hope that it won't be the first route, because that just is too trite and cliched for the hopes I have for this series to pull out of its slump.

Confession: Trip and T'Pol were the two characters I liked the least - all right, disliked - at the beginning of the series. I like how the two have developed over the past three seasons, though lately Jolene Blalock makes T'Pol sound like she's going to burst into tears at any second, and I particularly like the chemistry between Connor Trineer and Ms. Blalock, and would like to see more done with that, considering it seems to me that so few of the other characters have much chemistry.

On other notes, nice nods to continuity throughout the episode: Archer mentioning stranding Damar's ship (I know, I know, but it was Casey Biggs from DS9 and all I could see and hear was Damar), references to early planets Enterprise explored, Trip's referring back to earlier events between he and T'Pol, Captain Jeffries oversaw the design of the Warp 5 ships...

Did anyone notice what appeared to be the logo of Earth's Starfleet hanging outside Admiral Forrest's office? Notice that swoopy looking bit that looked like the Star Trek chevron tilted on its side and distorted a bit? Someone's trying to explain where that shape came from, but you can't because TOS's ships all had different crests on their uniforms. But 3 out of 5 for effort.

Is it me, or was the beginning of the bar scene almost a blatant attempt to dispute the Internet conversations about Reed's sexual orientation?

What is up with the appearance of Hoshi? Did the actor tick off someone in authority, that she appears for maybe 30 seconds in this episode, and barely at all in the first two eps of the season? Or maybe TPTB are giving her some time to finish up work on the movie Spectres (in which she stars with Marina Sirits from Next Gen and Tucker Smallwood, who played the darker Xindi Humanoid last season, and the Admiral in Space: Above and Beyond). But her scene with Phlox was the most animated and passionate I've seen Hoshi since the beginning of the series. I'd like to see an episode this season focusing on her, and not in a beauty-and-the-beast sort of way, either! More character development!

I'm not sure what's up with Captain Hernandez. First off, she's GU: she and Archer can't have much of a relationship when their ships are on opposite sides of Earth's sphere of influence. (And don't give me that "What happens on the mountain stays on the mountain dren; I'm not buying a fling on the rock as a curative for Archer's crisis of conscience.) Second, I'm not sure Starfleet (assuming it has its roots in the Earth military services) would approve any more of two starship commanders "fraternizing" than they would a superior and an subordinate officer. Third, didn't TOS pretty much take Dr. Lester's comment about starship captains being a men-only club at face value? So how does one explain that one of the earliest starship's had a woman captain?

After a season or so of not really caring about whether I saw Enterprise or not, I'm actually looking forward to the next few weeks, and seeing what they do with a great actor like Brent Spiner...

OK, 40 Eridani, then. I've heard both.

There are several interesting stars in the ~16ly range with a Aql (Altair) the most famous. Besides this bright one (A7, 11*I, 1.9*M) the only other star comparable to the sun is o² Eri (K1, 0.34*I, 0.89*M) but this is a multiple star and even has a white dwarf.

(M - mass of our sun, I - visual intensity of the sun, all numbers from an old book)

I haven't seen the episode yet but how did the star look (color, brightness)?

Vulcan's sun is generally acknowledged to be a red dwarf.

Vulcan's location, bottom of page.

Archer saves Earth and has to go through a grilling of debriefing, although he does have some schools named after him. Janeway and her ship are thrown into the Delta Quadrant and she gets promoted. Go figure.

You see, Janeway was debriefed and her superiors thought, "Oh dear God. We keep that woman from every commanding a starship again." and so they promoted her and gave her a desk job.

Finally,

This Trek episode once and for all lays to rest Lester's comments about women not being able to captain starships in Starfleet in TOS' "Turnabout Intruder"

Ok, then we have a result: Vulcan orbits indeed o² Eri (aka 40 Eridani). The distance is ok and it's a reddish small star. The other two components in this triple system are actually quite far way (400 au, 10*Pluto) from the main body and I think that's enough to guarantee a stable orbit for the planet in the ST universe.

I don't know why some of you guys have thought that Columbia wasn't seen in this episode -- we saw it in drydock ahead of the Enterprise! If you take the time to read the nameplate...

For that matter, when Hernandez and Archer are on the bridge, he makes a comment about Hernandez eventually wanting to install a lumbar support on the command chair because "she'll be spending a lot of hours there", and he points at that chair while saying this. It should be clear from these two points that this scene was on the Columbia bridge.

"How did this episode jump the shark?"

Can you say: "PufferPhlox", boys and girls?
What an unbelievably useless reaction. If he had poisonous spines that popped out when he did that, like that fish they eat in Japan, it would've been different.

Of course there was the whole Wedding From Hell; and everybody thought Commander Chakotay and Seven Of Nine getting together was kind of sudden(D@mn you, Kenneth Biller; d@mn you, you J/C homewrecking SOB).

And how long before those perve fanfic writers hook T'Mom up with Commander Jack@$$?

Can you say, "Wrestling fans have a low IQ level"?

First time I've seen Jack Donner since TOS' "The Enterprise Incident." Too bad his part is so small. But, I always get a kick of seeing actors of past Treks turning up in the current series.
BTW, my 14 1/2 year old son is a wrestling fan. In fact, I've accompanied him to nine or ten matches. He does not have a low IQ.

By Lisa on Sunday, October 24, 2004 - 09:11 pm:
Can you say, "Wrestling fans have a low IQ level"?

Only if you can say "bigotted" when looking in a mirror.

Not that I agree with Stone Cold Seven, but his being a mark has nothing to do with his opinions, his IQ, or anything really, other than he happens to find a particular form of entertainment to be worth his while.

Bottom line? Know your role and shut your mouth, unless you have something better to say than a blanket insult.

Have a nice day!

By Adam Bomb on Sunday, October 24, 2004 - 11:45 pm:

BTW, my 14 1/2 year old son is a wrestling fan. In fact, I've accompanied him to nine or ten matches. He does not have a low IQ.

Is that where you got the name Adam Bomb, from the old WWF character? Or is it just a coincidence?

Anyway, just so I'm not completely off topic, I liked the ep, but not as much as the first two of the season. Guess I'm not as jaded on alien Nazis as the rest of you!

I hope they have Phlox using his ability in a useful way at some point and don't just leave it ignored from now on. Not that I want him doing it every week or anything.

The lady Captain's lucky Star Fleet didn't decide to pull a Defiant on her and give Archer the Colombia and rename it the Enterprise, rather than fixing up the trashed ship. (Not saying it would be a good thing for them to have done, just I wouldn't put it past them!)

Speaking of the ship, how long is the refit supposed to take? That was one damaged vessel! From the shape it was in I'd expect a few months. Think they'll mention how long, or just gloss it over?

Stone Cold - And how long before those perve fanfic writers hook T'Mom up with Commander Jack@$$?
Didn't you see my post on the MiSTing Enterprise board? 8-/

There was a WWE character named "Adam Bomb"? That's news to me. I know that there's a punk rock band of that name. John and Luigi know my real name.
I was impressed by this ep, and the season looks promising. If Star Trek Enterprise dies after its fourth season, at least it will have gone out on a good note.

This episode just didn't seem "right" for me. T'Pol and her mother seemed more like a suburban American family than a Vulcan one. Maybe it was Joanna Cassidy's American accent. Their home seemed a bit too much American suburban too. I always pictured Vulcan homes as being more stark. T'Pol and Tucker's relationship just seems a convenient contrivance. Most of the time, there doesn't seem to be a burning love between the two. It just pops up whenever a plot calls for it. T'Pol seems to be getting too thin too.

It's not my fault, captain! I just found this big red button and when I pushed it, all damage started to dissapear!
I can't believe no-one have noticed that - when we see NX-01 in drydock, it looks almost completely repaired after, what, two days? Considering what Trip said back in "Dead Stop", it would take at least three months to repair all the damage.

Stone Cold wrote:
Can you say: "PufferPhlox", boys and girls?
What an unbelievably useless reaction. If he had poisonous spines that popped out when he did that, like that fish they eat in Japan, it would've been different.

Useless? He didn't get hit!

I tried to count the number of rows and columns of seats in the stadium.

There are two small sections in front, then four larger sections behind them. I think there are four sections of stands on each side, and three in the back.

Two small sections: 7 rows, 42 columns.
Four larger sections: 11 rows, 94 columns.
Three sections in back: 20? rows, 40? columns??
Four sections on each side: 20? rows, 44 columns??

The stands were really hard to count, and it's mostly guessing.

But the total comes to something less than 15,000 people. Maybe this had been built years earlier and was refurbished as a ceremonial place, so as not to have it go to waste. Maybe the land in the area was too crowded, and there's plenty of room offshore.

I wonder if they could have used footage of a real football stadium and used CGI to modify it, so it wouldn't look so artificial?

I suppose the two sections in front were for the rest of the crew and their families and closest friends. The rest are Starfleet VIPs.

But they can barely see anything, so they'd all be watching on their laptops.

Bakula sure does emote.

Phlox couldn't do the puffer-fish trick before because he had a virus or something, maybe.

Koss says he wants T'Pol to be happy. I'm sure they were speaking Vulcan and the actual word has a different connotation--like, being satisfied with the current situation. It might not have an exact English translation. An example would be, how would a Vulcan feel if you hit him in the face with a pie? (Or anything else for that matter. ) A Vulcan would be "happy" if you didn't do that.

Can Koss contract Pa'nar Syndrome from T'Pol?
Wouldn't it have been worth mentioning?

Archer and everybody else should have been getting therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. We just didn't see it, but it should be several months at least before they go on another mission. Maybe the next episodes will just take place a few months later.


Archer points to a star near Polaris, one they visited; was that the Paraagan colony planet
from "Shockwave"?

It could be in the constellation of Ursa Minor, Camelopardus, Cepheus or Draco.

Here are two possible stars:

http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/anwar.html

ANWAR AL FARKADAIN (Eta Ursae Minoris).
Class F, 1.4 times solar mass, 7 times solar luminosity, 97 lightyears distant.

http://www.stellar-database.com/Scripts/search_star.exe?ID=206500

Psi(1) Draconis

Distance from Sol: 71.9 light-years

Right Ascension and Declination: 17h41m +72°8m

It's a binary, two stars 661 A.U.s apart.

Star A is of type F5IV-V, magnitude +4.59 quite visible for anybody with good eyes.

An earthlike planet would be 2.48 A.U. from the star.

Component B is of type F8V, and an earthlike planet would be about 1.42 A.U. from the star.

Archer points to a star near Polaris, one they visited; was that the Paraagan colony planet
from "Shockwave"?

No, that was the planet from Strange New World. The one with the psychotropic pollen.

Thanks for the info.

Here's another interesting one.

Gamma Cephei, also called Er Rai, an Arabic name meaning a shepherd. It's southeast of Polaris, close enough that Archer would just point to the nearest star he knows the name of and say, "It's near there."

But Scott Bakula was pointing about halfway up the sky. If he was in California, he should have been pointing higher.

Gamma Cepheii's Right Ascension and Declination: 23h39m, +77°37'
Distance from Sol 45 ly, a binary, 22 A.U. apart, period 70 years.

A is a K1IV and an earthlike planet would be about 2.9 AU away.

Astronomers found a companion, about 1.8 Jupiter masses, period 2.5 years, with a distance ranging from 1.68 to 2.52 A.U.

The companion star is a red dwarf. An earthlike planet would be .08 AU away with a period of 15 days.

There are several red dwarfs near this star, and one good solar type star with just a catalog number.

BD+78 826 is a type G9 V, 20 lightyears from Gamma Cepheii.

So any one of those could be the actual location of the planet.

The planet could also be in the constellation of Camelopardalis, the Giraffe, and there's an interesting variable star, RU Cam, which the Enterprise might have investigated, but I couldn't find the coordinates for that star online.

The TOS episode "Operation--Annihilate" establishes that Vulcan has a bright sun and therefore Vulcans developed an inner eyelid. However, it doesn't look particularly bright (although not cloudy) in "Amok Time". In "STTMP", it looks rather subdued in lighting, again, not bright.

40 Eridani A is much less luminous than our sun.

Also, Vulcan cannot be in the Altair system, since it would only take a few hours to drop off Spock in "Amok Time" and get to the inauguration ceremonies on Altair V. Since the Admiral told Kirk that the system (meaning the entire solar system) was patching itself up after an interplanetary war, it is doubtful Vulcan is there, because Vulcan could not help but be caught up in such a conflict.

We can safely rule out Altair.

Another possibility is 70 Ophiuchi.

40 Eridani is mentioned in James Blish's novelization of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday": Kirk tells Captain Christopher that Vulcan orbits it, after Christopher mistakenly assumes Spock's planet is the suspected planet inside the orbit of Mercury that is now known not to exist. (But, boy, that sure would be a hot planet... and an inner eyelid sure would come in handy!)

Yes, the starship in drydock did look pretty good until I saw the name was not Enterprise, but looked like Columbia.

I wonder if this Columbia is the one that will disappear in the Talos region in another 60 or 70 years?

And when will the Valiant be launched?

And will Travis be mourning the disappearance of his family when the Horizon disappears somewhere in the Iotian system... complete with a copy of Chicago Mobs of the 20s (there should have been a throwaway scene of that book being in someone's quarters when Travis spent a few days visiting his family).

Valiant is to be lost at the edge of the galaxy, damaged by the energy barrier. Since the edge of the outer circumference of the galaxy is impossibly far away, it would make more sense if Valiant encountered the galactic barrier on the north or south flanks of the galaxy, which is much, much closer to Earth. Besides, if the barrier was only out on the outer circumference, it would be easy to bypass!

By the way, does anyone know if Jack Donner is related to Robert Donner... there is a facial resemblance. Robert played Exidor on Mork and Mindy, and also appeared in an episode of the TV series "Voyagers" as Buffalo Bill Cody.

By Adam Bomb on Monday, October 25, 2004 - 08:46 am:

There was a WWE character named "Adam Bomb"?

No, there was a WWF character named Adam Bomb. He was around sometime in the early to mid 90's, long before the company changed its name.

The same guy was later Wrath in WCW, then finally started wrestling under his real name, Brian Clark (though I'm not sure I spelled that right). </end hyjack>

Maybe it was Joanna Cassidy's American accent.

What accent? I didn't notice an accent. ;)

Yes, the vulcans seemed slightly "off" to me, but we've been promised that such things would be taken care of this year to explain why Enterprise vulcans have been "off".

Anon: Yeah, from what I've heard there's going to be a Surak-ian reformation on Vulcan akin to the Protestant Reformation in Europe. If that be true, then I wonder who the Vulcan equivalents of Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, John Hus (OK, he wasn't quite Reformation time, but he had a shaping influence on it)...?

Sven: what is your understanding of the phrase "jump the shark"? In my understanding, "jumping the shark" is when a show gets so old and stale and its ratings fall off so the producers come up with a ridiculous storyline in a desperate attempt to re-capture some of the lost audience.

I don't think that a little stunt like Phlox's face going poof or T'Pol's finally going through with something that was set up two seasons ago constitutes shark-jumping. I think Phlox's facial contortion will probably be one of those anomolous things that won't be referred to or seen again. As for T'Pol's marriage to Koss, I think it flows logically out of what TPTB have been doing with T'Pol over the past two years, and sets up very interesting character developments for T'Pol, her family (and the whole Vulcan Reformation thing) and for Trip.

As to this being the "Wedding From Hell", I don't know what you mean. For one thing, we saw only about 15 seconds of the wedding, and that at the end of the episode. I think the angst and agita over the impending marriage was actually downplayed. And T'Pol's decision was selfless, which is in contrast to what she's been doing for the past two years.

This doesn't even remotely compare to Chuckles and 37DD of Nine. That was something TPTB cobbled together for who-knows-what reason, but we've been building towards Trip and T'Pol for over a year now, the neural node noogies aside. The actors who play the characters actually have some sort of chemistry, whereas Robert Beltran and Jeri Ryan had chemistry that stank like month-old leftovers.

I understand your dislike/distrust of Enterprise right now, but I think these latest plotlines show more potential than the show has shown in the past two years. Here's hoping that Manny Coto will bring to Enterprise some of the attitudes of Strange World.

Doen't Trip have another sister?
Or other family?
I know when I was away when a near relative died, then first chance you get you get home & get with other relatives.

Hey! Did anybody know that BRENT SPINER is going to be on Enterprise next week?? You know, BRENT SPINER -- the guy who played DATA?? He's going to be ON! ENTERPRISE! NEXT WEEK!


Sorry if I spoiled it for anybody!!
(/sarcasm mode)

I really liked this episode.

Nice touch with Archer and Soval at the end.

Another touch I liked was the scene on the surface of Vulcan where T'Pol and Tucker gaze at a row of immense statues. It very much ties in with the new Vulcan scenes in the "improved" director's cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. A nice bit of continuity there!

Zul's comment from October 24 should actually read;
'Finally, this Trek episode once and for all lays to rest Lester's comment's about women not being able to captain starships in Starfleet *prior* to TOS's Turnabout Intruder, since we've seen one *after* Turnabout Intruder aboard the USS Saratoga in Star Trek IV.'
I've always thought it ridiculous for the producers to include such a comment, because it doesn't sound like an equal society, something Roddenberry insisted Trek was. Of course, by this time Gene wasn't in charge, and Freddy was, and maybe F.F. wasn't up on his 23rd century equal opportunity system.
What would happen if a woman was chief engineer, chief science officer, or chief navigator, and all of her superiors were planetside? Would the nearest male officer, despite rank, take over? What woman would want to serve in such an organization if the best she could do was commander, but not commander of a ship?
TNG then went the complete opposite way, when it seemed to me that there were more female admirals than male ones.

TNG then went the complete opposite way, when it seemed to me that there were more female admirals than male ones.

Don't know about that, but the female admirals weren't corrupt.

Nechayev was a hard@ss, but she wasn't corrupt.

When Dr. Lester made her comment about women being unable to become starship captains, Kirk seemed to agree with her. She said "It's not fair." Kirk replied, "No, it isn't."

benn: They said she already had a husband in "Bounty."

I thought that T'Pol just said that she had a fiance, or was supposed to marry Kos at some point, not that they were married. Of course, Vulcan betrothals could be akin to human betrothal in ancient times where you were as good as married you just hadn't had the formal ceremony or were living together. – Taoiseach

If T’Pol said he was her husband, that would be consistent with Amok Time – Spock called T’Pring his wife even though they hadn’t done the marriage ritual yet. He also said their status at the time was less than a marriage, but more than a betrothal.

Maybe the reason we haven’t seen Phlox’s puffer-face before is because it was a reaction of anger, not fear. And maybe it only occurs when he has no other outlet for the anger.

What is up with the appearance of Hoshi? Did the actor tick off someone in authority, that she appears for maybe 30 seconds in this episode, and barely at all in the first two eps of the season? Or maybe TPTB are giving her some time to finish up work on the movie Spectres Taoiseach

I thought “Spectres” was finished a while back, but at least we got to see Linda Park’s legs in her scene. That almost makes up for not seeing her much so far this season.

This episode marks the first appearance of Commander Williams since Broken Bow. – Luigi Novi

I don't have tapes to double check, but I could swear that Williams has appeared in other episodes. I think he may have been in "Shadows of P'Jem," "Shockwave, Part 2," or "The Expanse." – The Undesirable Element

The IMDB indicates that he was in Shockwave, Part II as well as Regeneration.

??? I never said Starfleet admirals were corrupt???

He didn't say you did.

I think ScottN meant that he's not sure whether TNG depicted more females than males in the admiralty (I'm not sure I agree with that, either)... but every corrupt admiral has been male.


When Dr. Lester made her comment about women being unable to become starship captains, Kirk seemed to agree with her. She said "It's not fair." Kirk replied, "No, it isn't." - Nove Rockhoomer

One could read his remark as playing lip service to what Lester was saying, but subtextually he could have been referring to the unfairness of her condition.

Well, not too bad. I definitely got some Family vibes from it. It was nice to see T'Pol's home, Archer dealing with the actions he took (Much like Picard did), and some of Earth's attitudes toward aliens. I was disappointed that Phlox decided not to go with Hoshi and Travis back to the planet though.

I was glad that Trip decided not to admit his feelings for T'Pol before she wed her fiance. It was a nice change from what usually happens on TV in these situations.

Geez, Soval's still an ass. But it was great to see he and Archer reach some sort of understanding at the end of the episode. It's a good step.

Did anyone else think of Q's speech to Picard in Q Who? about the dangers in the universe when Archer is suggesting to Erika that Starfleet stick closer to home? I think it would be nice to see someone like Q give Archer a nice kick in the pants.

Loved all the continuity. Captain Jeffries, P'Jem, the SNW planet, and even the return Commander Williams. No Admiral Leonard though.

So, there's a female captain way back in 2154. And she's commanding the second NX no less. Wasn't there a big deal in Turnabout Intruder about how Starfleet had no female captains? Did she just mean at the time?

Did anyone else find Reed's struggle helping Phlox carry all his luggage a little funny?

Sparrow47: Trip and T'Pol have to get up at 0400 to prepare a meal? When the Vulcans have food synthesizers?
Just because they have synthesizers doesn't mean people are going to stop cooking food. Look at Sisko.

Rona: and her mother seemed more like a suburban American family than a Vulcan one. Maybe it was Joanna Cassidy's American accent. Their home seemed a bit too much American suburban too.
I thought that their home seemed a little more spartan than that, but that's just me.

Kazeite: I can't believe no-one have noticed that - when we see NX-01 in drydock, it looks almost completely repaired after, what, two days? Considering what Trip said back in "Dead Stop", it would take at least three months to repair all the damage.
They didn't have Earth's resources at that point, or a drydock. And we don't know how much time has passed, though I guess you could deduce from the fact that it hasn't been to long since it docked that Archer went to the ceremony, was debriefed, and went rock climbing for a few days. So it was probably no more than a week.

Though there did appear to still be a big gash on the saucer


GCapp: And when will the Valiant be launched?
I think that it was actually launched in the 21st century, shortly after contact with the Vulcans. How it could reach the galactic barrier when humans hadn't even reached Warp 2 yet, you've got me.

GCapp: And will Travis be mourning the disappearance of his family when the Horizon disappears somewhere in the Iotian system... complete with a copy of Chicago Mobs of the 20s (there should have been a throwaway scene of that book being in someone's quarters when Travis spent a few days visiting his family).
The Horizon that went to Iotia wasn't a cargo freighter, it was a Daedalus-Class starship.

And there was actually a copy of that book. Apparently you can see it on Travis's shelf in his room. I didn't spot it, but a few people hear did. Check out the Horizon thread.

ScottN: Don't know about that, but the female admirals weren't corrupt
Except for that one that came onboard to interrogate in everyone. In The Drumhead wasn't it? Or was she just crazy?

Good point, Josh, though I think she was crazy, not corrupt.

She was neither... she was just over-zealous.

The whole point behind the conflict with the Xindi was that the Xindi were being manipulated. Why is Archer thinking that humanity needs to mimic the Vulcans and keep Starfleet close to home? Archer knows about the formation of the Federation and he knows that it's beneficial to humanity. I can understand his change in philosophy regarding weapons on starships, but I don't understand his hesitation to explore the galaxy.

AMAZING DIPLOMACY OF THE WEEK:
>> Reed tells Phlox that an Andorian was attacked on Earth. Now I know Enterprise is making progress with the Andorians, but I didn't think relations were so good that Andorians were visiting Earth. - TUE
Americans can be found in every country on Earth, despite the government's diplomatic relations. Businessmen, scholars, religious emmisaries, tourists, you name it. There are dozens of reasons why Andorians might be on Earth.

Absolutely right, Luigi: this was the strength of the original series, and the strength of every good episode of Star Trek since. This is what made/makes Farscape one of the finest hours of television, and - despite more than occasional bouts of terrible dialogue - this was also what made Babylon 5 so good. - Taoiseach
Having seen Farscape-Peacekeeper Wars twice now, and being amazed at how seamlessly Ben Browder, Claudia Black, and cast have stepped back into those roles, I really have a sense of how far Trek has fallen. They've managed to form a deeper dimension between Tucker and T'Pol, and Phlox owns every scene he's in, but the rest of the supporting cast is paper thin.

"Absolutely right, Luigi: this was the strength of the original series, and the strength of every good episode of Star Trek since."

No offense, but are you drunk? The original series was the very definition of a standalone. No episode affected others.

Yeah, if anything, it's the strenght of DS9. Arcs, characters changing, affected by what they've been through, etc.

The original series was the very definition of a standalone. No episode affected others.
The Menagerie, Part I affected The Menagerie, Part II ;-)

Also Mudd's Women & I, Mudd had a definite connection.

By Any Other Name mentioned Spock's ability to telepathically control someone at a distance that he used in The Armageddon Factor & mentioned the planet's name.

For the most part you are correct. Since TPTB couldn't be sure which order the episodes would be seen in they had to avoid directly referencing an episode that may or may not air before the one they were making, but there were the occasional references to earlier episodes.

Regarding women as captain. I recall reading, perhaps in a Nitpicker Guide, that the remark could be read as:
"Your (referring to Kirk) world of...doesn't include women."
In other words, it was Kirk who didn't include women in his world because of his devotion to being Captain of Enterprise.
And he admitted that it wasn't fair, but that's the way he is.

The Armageddon Factor

I think you mean A Taste of Armageddon. The planet was Eminar 7.

Sulu referred to the Horta from The Devil In The Dark in the 3rd season episode That Which Survives, and Kirk, in Lester's body, mentions events from The Empath and The Tholian Web.
I think it was the nature of network tv to keep the majority of episodes as standalone episodes, which isn't so bad. I pity anyone that entered half way through the Dominion Wars or the Xindi arc.

And I stand corrected on the male admirals being outnumbered by the females; I checked my slightly-out-of-date Trek Encyclopedia, and using the cast lists in the back, which list the parts they played, I found that there were more men than I remembered. This is weird, since I recall, while watching the TNG episodes in first run, that it seemed like there was another woman admiral every other week, not including Neychev (or whatever her name was).

I guess that’s the universal sign for “just give me half a peace of that”
Why does the Earth symbol on the front of the podium at which Archer speaks in the teaser only have a branch of olive leaves on its left side, but not on its right?
Walking up the dais to greet the masses. One crewman tripped, fell backward, and knocked down eight others.
We learn from Archer’s speech in the teaser that the number of crewmen killed during the year-long Xindi storyline was 27. But he said in the teaser of The Forgotten that 18 had died. Have nine people really died since then? When did all this happen?
They ran out of Krazy Glue
In the second scene of Act 1, when Archer is inspecting the repairs and upgrades to the bridge, the crew appear to using acetylene torches. Does this seem right? Would they still be using chemical-based tools by the 2150’s?
Yeah, because you just know that there’s lots of trees on a desert planet with two suns…
Why is the message from Koss that T’Les gives T’Pol in Act 2 on paper, and in a paper envelope?
Anyone else getting the feeling that in the 2150’s Vulcan “logic” is not much different from Earth “astrology”?
As tends to be the case on this series, T’Les does not come off as a Vulcan. She is given to the same type of facial expressions and vocal inflections as humans, an abundance of verbal contractions compared to how we’ve come to know Vulcans speak, and tells Trip in the opening scene of Act 3 that she knows that she and T’Pol are romantically involved, and that there is no logic in denying it. Well, how much logic is there in concluding a fact based solely on a hypothesis and intuition, and not considering other possibilities, like the fact notion that they were once involved, or that perhaps they had feelings, but had not yet acted on them?
Yeah, really. Anyone who knows T’Pol knows they won’t be happy after marrying her.
And Koss isn’t much better. In the second scene of Act 3, when trying to convince T’Pol to marry him so that his family can help her mother, tells her that he wants her to be happy. This sort of wording is totally out of charater for a Vulcan.
They watched the show. Even Klingons and Romulans have their standards.
In the third scene of Act 3, Archer laments to Hernandez that the seven million people killed by the Xindi might still be alive if they hadn’t been out exploring space “stirring up trouble.” This seems to be an odd bit of reasoning for Archer, since he, more than anyone else, knows that the Xindi attacked Earth because they were manipulated into doing so by the Guardians because the Guardians would be defeated by the Federation centuries in the future. Had Earth been attacked by the Klingons or Romulans (as I feared might happen), that would’ve been different.
Hubble who?
Trip mentions in the opening scene of Act 4 that Vulcan is 16 light years from Earth. I consulted the Research Consortium on Nearby Stars, which listed 44 stars that are closer than that to Earth, but the list was cut off at Gl 473 B (FL Virginis), which is 14.96 ly from Earth. Nor could I find any such stars at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_listing, which lists 69 star systems both under and over 16 light years from Earth. So does anyone know if there are any stars 16 light years from Earth?
Maybe Archer’s tricorder was already filled up with upskirt shots
When Archer and Hernandez reach a peak in their climbing in the second scene of Act 4, she says they should’ve brought a camera. Wouldn’t the tricorder Archer used to date the mountain lion’s paw print earlier have been able to take a picture? Wouldn’t such devices be multitasking? Hell, my cell phone has a camera, and I live in the early 21st century!
Hernandez, for her part, became particularly suspicious of Archer’s story around the part where he climbed to the very top and screamed, “I’m the KING OF THE WORLD!!!”
Archer also mentions to Hernandez in this scene the planet they explored in Strange New World, which he had first mentioned in Act 3, and says that there was a mountain range on the Southern continent with a view was almost as amazing as this one. First of all, that mountain was on the northern continent, not the southern one, as that is where he told Travis to find a spot to put down the shuttlepod in Act 1 of that episode. Second, while we did see a mountain in that episode in the distance, nothing indicated that they did any climbing in that episode that would allow them to ascertain what the view would be like from it, as the areas they explored looked like a grassy plain (where they landed the pod), forest areas and streams and lakes.
Who’d they have to mind meld with to get that job?
In Act 4, Commander Williams refers to the body that Archer debriefs as the “Command Council.” If this is a Starfleet Command Council, and they are entrusted with classfied information, as Williams says, then why are three Vulcans serving on it, particularly given the mistrust that has grown between Earth and Vulcan from episodes like Breaking the Ice, Shadows of P’Jem, and Stigma? It’s one thing to advise their allies, but to serve on their space exploration command bodies and be privy to classified info, especially after they’ve proven to be untrustworthy?
Yeah, but even he didn’t understand that whole Temporal Cold War storyline
Also, Soval tells Archer after the debriefing that he concurs with Archer’s actions in the Expanse, based on T’Pol’s reports. Does this mean that Soval now believes in time travel too?

We learn from Archer’s speech in the teaser that the number of crewmen killed during the year-long Xindi storyline was 27. But he said in the teaser of The Forgotten that 18 had died. Have nine people really died since then? When did all this happen?

As I recall, there was a battle during Zero Hour. And that the Enterprise was in trouble until Shran showed up to bail them out. Perhaps the extra 9 died then?

Yeah, I guess. It’s just that they usually don’t kill that many crewman in a single episode, unless it’s a really huge battle like in Azati Prime.

Also, T’Pol introduced the crew to the term “Minshara class” in Strange New World, but in Act 3 of this episode, Archer refers to the planet in that episode to Hernandez as “M-class” Is this episode the first appearance of the term on the series? And since Archer is casually using this new abbreviated version of the term with Hernandez, who seems to understand it, are we to understand that it has been added to official Starfleet classifications?

TUE: PHLOX HAS AN INFLATABLE HEAD! What more needs to be said???!!
Luigi Novi: So he has a foot-long tongue, and some parts of his body are inflatable? No WONDER he has three wives!

TUE: Reed tells Phlox that an Andorian was attacked on Earth. Now I know Enterprise is making progress with the Andorians, but I didn't think relations were so good that Andorians were visiting Earth.
Luigi Novi: After the treaty Archer was responsible for between the Vulcans and the Andorians in Cease Fire, this wouldn’t surprise me.

TUE: The "waking dream" is a common theme in Star Trek, but it always amazes me how coherent the dreams of some characters can be. Archer's hallucination with the Xindi-Reptilians is a prime example.
Luigi Novi: Dreams are often coherent. I have found that when I go too long without sleep, and my sleep is particularly deep, my dreams tend to be very coherent.

TUE: The writers miss the most obvious reason for T'Pol's mother being asked to leave from the Science Academy: her Pa'Nar Syndrome. In "Stigma" it was established to be a disease that carried the eponymous stigma.
Luigi Novi: I think they were more angry for the actions T’Pol did that affected Vulcan than the ones that merely resulted in her contracting a disease.

TUE: Hernandez mentioning that the Columbia's first mission would be to bring a new warp coil to the stranded ship from "Damage."
Luigi Novi: I imagined that Archer asked the Xindi to do that after dropping them off near Earth at the end of Zero Hour.

Sparrow47: And why wasn't there a MACO representative on the podium?
Luigi Novi: It was only for the senior staff.

Sparrow47: Wasn't Phlox nearly assimilated in "Regeneration"? Why didn't his self-defence mechanism kick in then?
Luigi Novi: Because the mechanism responds to external threats. Not internal microscopic ones. A tiger doesn’t start roaring at its circulatory system when it contracts a virus.

Sparrow47: Sparrow47 : Trip and T'Pol have to get up at 0400 to prepare a meal? When the Vulcans have food synthesizers?
Luigi Novi: T’Les’ synthesizer wasn’t working, remember?

Clint X: Phlox has been through a lot for the head-puff to first show itself during a bar brawl.
Luigi Novi: It was the first time he had been confronted with an assailant who threatened a physical altercation, and gave him enough fair warning of his intentions for the instinct to kick in.

Clint X: Does the female captain cause any problems with TOS history?
Luigi Novi: I simply rationalize Janice Lester’s remark in Turnabout Intruder as the one-sided and inaccurate ravings of a lunatic. I regard her comments about women not being allowed to be starship commanders in the same way I do comments by anti-Semites would claim a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, or white supremacists claims that all the good jobs go to Asians and blacks using affirmative action.

Captain Dunsel: Hmmm... a starship captain that climbs rocks for recreation, a trip to Vulcan for a wedding, and Starfleet officers in a barroom brawl while on shore leave. Looks like someone spun the big "Wheel O' Trek Plots" and went with whatever the counters landed on.
Luigi Novi: Looks to me like the writers logically continued ongoing plot threads that have been set up since the beginning of the series, since so much of what we saw was follow-up from past episodes.

Captain Dunsel Though real life is not always so neatly resloved, I would have liked to see more time spent with these themes.
Luigi Novi: I don’t think it was neatly resolved. Archer now realizes that he’s changed since the ship launched three years ago, and not in a way that he’s proud of, so this will continue to haunt him. Phlox and the racist didn’t kiss and make up, so anti-alien racism on Earth may continue to be a problem. Trip admitted that he is in love with T’Pol, and instead of bowing to a cliché, the wedding was not called off at the last minute, and now T’Pol is now more firmly unattainable for Trip, which is a bit tragic. So how is any of this a “neat” resolution? “Resolution” doesn’t mean “happy ending.”

ScottN: I was wondering when Starfleet became a boys club. Another changed premise. In Amok Time(TOS), T'Pau expresses surprise at the presence of Kirk and McCoy, asking "Are our ceremonies for outworlders?" Here, nobody raises an eyebrow at Tucker's presence at the wedding. Of course, he did take the trouble to dress native.
Luigi Novi: That’s not a changed premise. T’Pau was simply not as open with aliens as T’Les or Koss.

KAM: Trip didn't seem to be too bothered by Vulcan's thinner atmosphere.
Luigi Novi: He presumably took tri-ox off-screen.

TUE: I don't have tapes to double check, but I could swear that Williams has appeared in other episodes. I think he may have been in "Shadows of P'Jem," "Shockwave, Part 2," or "The Expanse."
Luigi Novi: Big screwup on my part. Thanks.

TUE: Well, if the Enterprise had never gone out to explore the galaxy, the Federation probably never would have been formed. With no Federation, the Spherebuilders would not have perceived Earth as a threat.
Luigi Novi: Sure, something that happened hundreds of years after the cause is a real strong causal connection.

Taoiseach: And what was with the stadium in the middle of San Francisco Bay?
Luigi Novi: It wasn’t in the middle of the Bay. It was a short distance from the land, separated only by a small bridge.

Taoiseach: Yeah, and did you notice how the Vulcan Sun was well up when they sat down to eat?
Luigi Novi: Which one? Assuming Vulcan is 40 Eridani, it has three.

Taoiseach: Let's assume that time runs pretty close to the same on Vulcan. How lousy cooks are Trip and T'Pol if it takes them over two hours to prepare breakfast?
Luigi Novi: Why? We don’t know if time runs the same, and there is nothing in the episode that indicates that it takes them two hours to prepare it. Why assume that the Vulcans run their days as we do ours, especially if they have three suns, which would mean they have a totally different day/night cycle? You yourself mentioned how even here on Earth the sun doesn’t follow the same schedule in Alaska, as it does in say, New York.

Taoiseach: Someone's trying to explain where that shape came from, but you can't because TOS's ships all had different crests on their uniforms. But 3 out of 5 for effort.
Luigi Novi: You can’t explain where that shape came from simply because ships in TOS had different insignias? How do you figure? There are loads of possible explanations. That could’ve started out as the insignia for Starfleet Command, and sometime after TOS, it became the insignia for Starfleet.

Taoiseach: Is it me, or was the beginning of the bar scene almost a blatant attempt to dispute the Internet conversations about Reed's sexual orientation?
Luigi Novi: How so? What in the scene had to do with that? Giving autographs to females? And besides, Reed has been established to have had relationships with females as far back as Shuttlepod One, when it was revealed that he had at least four prior relationships, one of which was with a woman Trip had been with.

Taoiseach: What is up with the appearance of Hoshi? Did the actor tick off someone in authority, that she appears for maybe 30 seconds in this episode, and barely at all in the first two eps of the season?
Luigi Novi: This is hardly exclusive to Hoshi, or even this series. By far it is Travis who has gotten the least amount of screen time, dialogue, and character development on this series, and previous series gave the short shrift to Troi, Kes, Harry Kim, Chakotay, and Paris, and to a somewhat lesser degree, Geordi, Crusher, and Neelix.

Taoiseach: But her scene with Phlox was the most animated and passionate I've seen Hoshi since the beginning of the series.
Luigi Novi: She was pretty passionate in Shockwave part I regarding people talking smack about Archer.

Taoiseach: she and Archer can't have much of a relationship when their ships are on opposite sides of Earth's sphere of influence.
Luigi Novi: Where did the episode indicate they were on opposite sides of Earth’s sphere of influence?

Taoiseach: Second, I'm not sure Starfleet (assuming it has its roots in the Earth military services) would approve any more of two starship commanders "fraternizing" than they would a superior and an subordinate officer.
Luigi Novi: “Roots in” doesn’t mean “exactly like.” Trek has a long history of showing Earth to be more enlightened about things like that in the future.

Taoiseach: Third, didn't TOS pretty much take Dr. Lester's comment about starship captains being a men-only club at face value?
Luigi Novi: I don’t recall “TOS” making any clear indication on that point one way or the other, and since Lester was a few french fries shy of a Happy Meal, I wouldn’t put too much stock in what she said.

Electron: There are several interesting stars in the ~16ly range with a Aql (Altair) the most famous.
Luigi Novi: Altair is 17 ly away, not 16.

Electron: Besides this bright one (A7, 11*I, 1.9*M) the only other star comparable to the sun is o<sum> Eri (K1, 0.34*I, 0.89*M) but this is a multiple star and even has a white dwarf.
Luigi Novi: What’s really weird is that I looked through a list of stars that I linked to above, and Eridani is the first one on the list, and stated to be less than 16.5ly away! How did I miss that?

Electron: I haven't seen the episode yet but how did the star look (color, brightness)?
Luigi Novi: We didn’t see the sun in an exterior space shot, but only shots of the Vulcan landscape during daytime.

ScottN: Vulcan's sun is generally acknowledged to be a red dwarf.
Luigi Novi: By whom? Where?

Anonymous: Archer saves Earth and has to go through a grilling of debriefing, although he does have some schools named after him. Janeway and her ship are thrown into the Delta Quadrant and she gets promoted.
Luigi Novi: This implies that Janeway was not grilled and debriefed. Where was this established? We didn’t see or hear anything of her or the Voyager crew between Endgame(VOY) and ST Nemesis.

Stone Cold Steven Of None: Can you say: "PufferPhlox", boys and girls?
Luigi Novi: What does that have to do with jumping the shark?

Stone Cold Steven Of None: What an unbelievably useless reaction. If he had poisonous spines that popped out when he did that, like that fish they eat in Japan, it would've been different.
Luigi Novi: But pufferfish don’t have those. Is it a useless reacton in them? Evolution provides such things to help scare away predators, and it worked in Phlox’s case. So how is it useless?

Lisa: Can you say, "Wrestling fans have a low IQ level"?
Luigi Novi: How high is the IQ of someone who judges all wrestling fans from a sample of one?

Anonymous: Speaking of the ship, how long is the refit supposed to take? That was one damaged vessel! From the shape it was in I'd expect a few months. Think they'll mention how long, or just gloss it over?
Luigi Novi: Vulcan is 16ly away, and Broken Bow established that it takes 4.53 days to travel a light year at Warp 5, which means the round trip for Trip and T’Pol alone would be 145 days, not counting the time spent there. Since the Vulcans have Warp 6, and possibly Warp 7, it is obviously significantly less than that, but how less, we don’t know.

Kazeite: I can't believe no-one have noticed that - when we see NX-01 in drydock, it looks almost completely repaired after, what, two days?
Luigi Novi: Putting aside the fact that that was the NX-02 Columbia, and not the NX-01, nothing in the episode established that two days passed between the end of Storm Front part II and that shot in this episode.

roger: Koss says he wants T'Pol to be happy. I'm sure they were speaking Vulcan and the actual word has a different connotation--like, being satisfied with the current situation. It might not have an exact English translation.
Luigi Novi: They tend to use the word “satisfactory,” and there are plenty of other appropriate English words, like “content,” “satisfied,” etc. Why not those?

roger: Can Koss contract Pa'nar Syndrome from T'Pol? Wouldn't it have been worth mentioning?
Luigi Novi: He can only catch it if they mind meld (which is not allowed in Vulcan society), and she did mention it. In the only conversation they have in the episode, in Act 3, she mentions that she was sick, although she didn’t mention it was Pa’nar.

roger: Gamma Cephei, also called Er Rai, an Arabic name meaning a shepherd. It's southeast of Polaris, close enough that Archer would just point to the nearest star he knows the name of and say, "It's near there."
Luigi Novi: He didn’t say it was “near there,” he said it was “just to the left of Polaris,” which is entirely subjective, because it only describes how the two stars appear two-dimensionally on Earth.

GCapp: Another possibility is 70 Ophiuchi.
Luigi Novi: That’s 16.6 light years away. Wouldn’t Trip round off by saying “17”?

GCapp: I wonder if this Columbia is the one that will disappear in the Talos region in another 60 or 70 years?
Luigi Novi: No, because that ship had a prefix of S.S.

Nove Rockhoomer: When Dr. Lester made her comment about women being unable to become starship captains, Kirk seemed to agree with her. She said "It's not fair." Kirk replied, "No, it isn't."
Luigi Novi: Good point. He might’ve been humoring her because he knew she was either nuts, or just plain impossible to talk to or convince. Maybe he meant it wasn’t “fair” because she flunked out or something, or maybe he was just referring to her overall lot in life, rather than the specific comment about women on starships.

Josh M: I think it would be nice to see someone like Q give Archer a nice kick in the pants.
Luigi Novi: Didn’t Hernandez do that? (Okay, so she didn’t so much give him a kick in the pants as offer to let him into hers, but still…)

Rene: No offense, but are you drunk? The original series was the very definition of a standalone. No episode affected others.
Luigi Novi: I think Taoiseach wasn’t talking about my comment about continuity per se, but about how good episodes feature characters being affected by plot events. Remember, this was the quote of mine that he quoted:

This is what stories should be...events that actually affect the characters.

TOS did have those.

KAM: Also Mudd's Women & I, Mudd had a definite connection. By Any Other Name mentioned Spock's ability to telepathically control someone at a distance that he used in The Armageddon Factor & mentioned the planet's name.
Luigi Novi: I think Rene was talking about my comment about continuity that depicts emotional effects on a character over a period of time resulting from ongoing plot threads.

Anonymous: Regarding women as captain. I recall reading, perhaps in a Nitpicker Guide, that the remark could be read as: "Your (referring to Kirk) world of...doesn't include women." In other words, it was Kirk who didn't include women in his world because of his devotion to being Captain of Enterprise.
And he admitted that it wasn't fair, but that's the way he is.
Luigi Novi: That was in the Chronology, at the end of the entry for that episode. The authors write that “we” (meaning they) interpreted it that way, but stated that Roddenberry disagreed with this rationalization, admitting in later years that the line was simply sexist. But this doesn’t mean that externally, we can’t anti-nit it by saying that Lester was just a fruit loop, and that Kirk was just playing along and patronizing her.

Will: And I stand corrected on the male admirals being outnumbered by the females; I checked my slightly-out-of-date Trek Encyclopedia, and using the cast lists in the back, which list the parts they played, I found that there were more men than I remembered. This is weird, since I recall, while watching the TNG episodes in first run, that it seemed like there was another woman admiral every other week, not including Neychev (or whatever her name was).
Luigi Novi: This is because all the admirals in TOS were male.

GCapp - Another possibility is 70 Ophiuchi.
Luigi Novi - That’s 16.6 light years away. Wouldn’t Trip round off by saying “17”?
Luigi estimates of light years can vary from source to source. Just because one book or online source says a star is 16.6 light years away doesn't mean all source books will say that or even that it is exactly accurate.
The most common method of estimating star distance is measuring the shift seen when the Earth is on opposite sides of the Sun & triangulating so some leeway in the estimate is to be expected.

Some more stuff on stellar things...

KAM is right - our estimates of star distances, even for nearby stars, are just that - estimates. They could easily have been refined by Archer's time.

I think 40 Eridani is still the best choice for the Vulcan system, not least because that's what all the non-canonical literature has consistently said since the 70s. Also, the three members of Eridani are red dwarfs that orbit around each other (it's a bit more complicated than that in reality, but you get the idea). This is useful in explaining Vulcan's idiosyncrasies - red sun, hot desert planet (assume it orbits further in towards its primary than Earth does) and perhaps even thin atmosphere - as that always confused me in the abstract, as how can Vulcan have higher gravity than Earth but a thinner atmosphere.

And the Eridani system is thought to be such that one of the stars swings around in a wider elliptical orbit around the other two, so we can explain why the Vulcans need an inner eyelid when we've always seen the Vulcan sky look pretty dim - it's for when the third stars swings around and comes very close (astronomically speaking) to Vulcan, bathing it in blinding light.

Maybe we could even use this to explain why Vulcan is the wrong colour in "Gambit"...or maybe that's going too far.

40 Eridani has already been used as the homeworld of aliens (often from planets similar to Vulcan) by Anne McCaffrey and Harry Turtledove.

Incidentally, if the Vulcans are 16 ly away, and the Andorians are in a neighbouring system, this means the Vulcan and Andorian night sky will look almost the same as Earth's. This might be an explanation for why the Orions are called as such - perhaps they attacked Vulcan or Andoria and were named for the native name for the constellation Orion, which lay in the direction from which they came. Then when the Vulcans told humans about the Orions, they translated the name into the human equivalent name for that constellation...

Luigi Novi: Also, Soval tells Archer after the debriefing that he concurs with Archer’s actions in the Expanse, based on T’Pol’s reports. Does this mean that Soval now believes in time travel too?
What does agreeing with Archer's actions have to do with belief in time travel?

Kazeite: I can't believe no-one have noticed that - when we see NX-01 in drydock, it looks almost completely repaired after, what, two days?
Luigi Novi: Putting aside the fact that that was the NX-02 Columbia, and not the NX-01, nothing in the episode established that two days passed between the end of Storm Front part II and that shot in this episode.
We do see a shot of the Enterprise near the end of the episode before the Hoshi/Phlox scene. As I pointed out, it does appear to have a nice gash on the forward part of the saucer.

Anonymous: Speaking of the ship, how long is the refit supposed to take? That was one damaged vessel! From the shape it was in I'd expect a few months. Think they'll mention how long, or just gloss it over?
Luigi Novi: Vulcan is 16ly away, and Broken Bow established that it takes 4.53 days to travel a light year at Warp 5, which means the round trip for Trip and T’Pol alone would be 145 days, not counting the time spent there. Since the Vulcans have Warp 6, and possibly Warp 7, it is obviously significantly less than that, but how less, we don’t know.

Thanks!

A lot of the information the crew gathered that moved their mission forward came from Daniels, and Archer and T'Pol's adventure in 21st century Detroit. What was Soval's reaction to reading about this?

Not to mention encountering their descendants and a second Starship Enterprise in E^2.

Here you can compare the 40 Eridani (replace the "%2B" in the URL with a "+") and the Sol system. The (circular) "comfort zone" around component A is at 0.613 au resulting in an orbital period of 202.515 days. This means that Vulcan's year is much shorter than Earth's. Its orange star looks nearly twice as large (0.92°) than the Sun (0.53°) on Earth.

All I got was "No star name matching "40+Eridani" found."

That's why I said replace the "%2B" in the URL with a "+" above. The forum here changes the "+" to its encoded form but the database there needs the original format.

Very interesting is this:
As seen from A: (B-C) would appear as magnitude -7.68
That's brighter than any star or planet visible from Earth but much darker than the full Moon. B-C's brightness can't be the reason for the Vulcan's inner eyelid but maybe C's flares are? J

4.53 days to travel one light year at Warp 5? How slow. If the Klingons in "Broken Bow" are, at most, 30 days away, then even at maximum warp, they couldn't be more than 7 light years away!

Either Warp 5 is far faster, or the Klingons are so close that it's a wonder they were content to be INSIDE Federation space for so many years.

Warp 5 has to be far, far faster for the series to "work".

4.5 is around 4-5 days, depending on the estimates. Warp 5 is faster, though no one is completely sure how much faster.

T'Pols log entry after the Spheres were destroyed was dated Feb 14. It took 2-3 days for the Aquatics to return Enterprise to Earth. We're assuming Daniels returned Enterprise to the exact moment they should have reached Earth after the Aquatics relesed them. Archer's log entry on reaching the Borderland was dated May 19. So it's been about 3 months.

I was talking about this with a friend of mine. Did anyone else think that the hair of the instigator of the bar brawl looked very close to William Shatner's in the original series? Or is this just me?

John D: Given that T'Pol's log entry was dated Feb 14, 2152, I don't think that's the most reliable piece of evidence in Trekdom.

There are two things of interest in the room where Archer is debriefed. First, there is one of the three sided viewers from TOS and second, there is a picture of the SS Enterprise from TMP on the wall.

As pointed out at Wikipedia, when T'Pol, Trip and T'Les eat breakfast together in the beginning of Act 2, and T'Les mentions the stasis unit, T'Pol is eating something without a utensil, and in front of her mom, despite her assertion in Broken Bow that Vulcans do not do this. Ironically, the item she is eating looks like a breadstick, which is the exact item she insisted on eating with a knife and fork in that prior episode. Also ironically, Trip uses a utensil. Wikipedia speculated that T'Pol adapted the habit of eating without utensils during her time on the Enterprise.