Date: September 10, 2021
Season 1, Episode 8
Music Video of the Day:
Interstellar News: I finished graduation check-out (step 2 of about 100) and then we worked on vacuum sealing about 50 pounds of meat from the butcher. There was chicken, pork, beef, and various sausages and we should be good for at least two months. I had a wonderful chat with a dear friend and solidified plans for a Sunday movie date. The freezer is now restocked and we’ll be back to watching Marvel movies tonight with The Black Panther.
TL;DR: The Enterprise encounters a comet that even the Vulcans have no record of while T’Pol acts strangely after receiving an encrypted message. A Vulcan ship arrives to “observe” the Enterprise, Reed and Mayweather work on the comet, and the rest of the crew answers questions from Tucker’s nephew’s class back on Earth. Archer sucks up his pride to accept help from the Vulcans when Mayweather is in trouble while T’Pol decides to break her marriage plans to stay on Enterprise. She also tries pecan pie.
Favorite Quote:
Archer: I’d love to know what they’re really doing here. You don’t find anything strange about them suddenly showing up?
T’Pol: Perhaps they’re simply curious.
Archer: Curious? That doesn’t sound very Vulcan to me.
Archer isn’t wrong.
“If Vanik is the kind of guy who likes to watch, let him.”: This was one of those strange episodes that has a lot and nothing going on all at the same time. Reed and Mayweather explore the comet and build a snowman, and there’s a lot of checking in on them and talking about the weather. There’s some drama when they need to get out in a hurry and Mayweather hurts himself, but otherwise it’s standard away team stuff. T’Pol is acting all weird and everyone thinks she’s a Vulcan spy but then it’s really arranged marriage stuff that serves to help make things even weirder between T’Pol and Tucker. I do love that she decides to act for herself and even indulge herself, because she’s spent so much time around the humans. It’s like in “Someone to Watch Over Me” when the ambassador over-indulged because he was set loose on Voyager, but a lot more tame because… Vulcans.
The “best” part of this episode is when Archer and the rest of the bridge are answering questions for the class back on Earth. Sato talks about the translator, Tucker gets a poop question, Phlox answers medical questions in his very special way, and Archer tackles a few other questions. I was laughing SO HARD when he answered the dating question with “Well, it’s not discouraged, but there isn’t a lot of privacy on a starship. Most of our crew share quarters with at least one other person, so it wouldn’t exactly be practical. But if two crewmembers decide that they really like each other, there are a lot of places they can go to look at the stars.” Dude, they were like elementary school kids… maybe that was not the question to answer. I loved that this was included, though, because these sorts of things were new for the children of Earth and it’s not something we’ve seen in the other series very much. Outreach is always fun, well… maybe not for Tucker. 6 pieces of cheese for Porthos!
TA Out!
To Boldly Go Where Everyone Has Gone Before 