Bound

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Groobies, groobies, everywhere, and nary a man can think!

When Enterprise heads into "Here There Be Dragons" territory, scouting the Berengarius System for a good place to build Starbase One, the Orions stir up trouble. SEXY trouble!

Orion Syndicate giant and son of anarchy Harrad "Piney" Sar seals a deal for part interest in a magnesite mine with Archer. He does this by giving the captain three Slave Girls: Navaar, D'Nesh, and Maras. The trio of scantily-clad dancers emit pheromones that drive men wild, give competing women headaches, and make Dr. Phlox stifle a yawn.

D'Nesh is soon giggling and pulling levers in engineering, while Navaar wiggles her way into Archer's command centre. I MEAN PANTS! Travis Mayweather recommends the same thing he did as a teen surrounded by Deltan ladies- flee the room and Exercise More.

Meanwhile, T'Pol and Trip discover they've accidentally entered a deep and monogamous mating bond. This allows them to read each other's minds, pick out furniture together now and then, and also makes Trip immune to the Green Honey Trap.

This is good news, because they are the only ones who can form a coherent thought when Harrad-Sar turns up again to capture Enterprise on orders from the real enslavers- his owners: The Slave Girls.

"Bound" doesn't ask for much, and it wants to be The Original Series so bad you almost feel sorry for it. Keep Off The Grass!

Divergence

**** (4 stars out of 5)
How do you manage to risk 160 lives and two top-of-the-line starships just to fix a broken brake line? Just like this... and it's awesome! This is also how mommy space-ships and daddy space-ships make baby space-ships. The mommy space-ship sidles up alongside daddy at 5 times the speed of light and they press real close in a special hug... then they exchange a tiny space-ship building man on a string. Go Trip!

Marab, the Klingon Augment who snuck quietly in and sabotaged the Enterprise, is disdainful of Reed for sneaky-peeky spying! Speaking of hypocrisy, Augment Laneth reports to Marab's father that his son died without honour... because she thinks mere HUMANS killed him. The smooth-foreheads are feeling ashamed because they may have lost some bravado along with their crunchy heads. Although some of the fear may be due to the genocide descending upon them for being infectious mutants. Plus the Klingon Admiral trying to murder all the infected is in bed with Section 31, who (last time I checked) are humans! Sometimes I think Klingons are making up the honourable/dishonourable rules as they go along.

Medicine is just as arbitrary as engineering and honour: Phlox does something with computers and centrifuges, then incubates the result in Captain Archer's veins, which temporarily gives Archer a Klingon forehead somehow. So nobody dies, but the virus is going to create several generations of miserable Klingons who look like humans. (Worse yet, millions of them also caught a cold once that made their hair look like bad curly wigs!)

"Divergence" also explains Saavik and Ziyal- their faces must have caught the Augment Flu!

Affliction

 ***** (4 stars out of 5)

Did you ever sing "More, more tell us more" when Uncle Remus sang "That's how the camel got his humps?" Well, here's more anyway... that's how the Klingons got their Lumps! (And, no, it wasn't a bite from Lumpy Space Princess.)

Speaking of a beautiful crooning voice and racist comedy, Transferred Trip Tucker has a new underling on the newly-launched starship Columbia: Ensign Stewie. Why, it's a cameo appearance from Seth MacFarlane! (Sadly, he does not sing The Thunder Song.)

Madam Chang's is a popular San Francisco restaurant. Unfortunately, popular with kidnappers. Klingon Uncle Phil drags Dr. Phlox to Qu'Vat Colony, where a Fresh Plague has become Bel Airborne! Klingons can't look weak by ASKING for help. So they stole a Metagenetics expert. (Not as easy as it sounds. First someone had to invent Metagenetics.)

Klingon medicine has advanced to the point of Retsenbaum Scissors and screw-top cranial replacement surgery, but they still can't get that cat out of the operating room! (Sorry, it's a targ, not a kitty cat.) What's the "Affliction" poised to kill millions of Klingons? It's a mutated Levodian Flu Virus. What mutated it, you ask? Oh, you didn't? Well, I'll tell you!

Jealous of human Augments, Klingons made their own! With Soong's embryos from the wreck of Malik's ship. Granted, the super-soldiers lost their cranial ridges, but on the bright side they don't live very long with the disgrace.

Archer's search for Phlox hits a Section 31 roadblock when it turns out Malcolm Reed works for those Shady Secret Servicemen. And while he's still reeling from the betrayal, Klingon Augments infiltrate Enterprise and program it to be the bus that couldn't slow down. Why? Best I can tell: the Augmentation process includes a penchant for pulse-pounding but ultimately meaningless cliffhangers.

The Aenar

***** (5 stars out of 5)
Welcome to Andoria at last! It's an ice moon of the gas giant Andor. Enjoy labyrinthine ice tunnels. Geothermal cities in glaciers. Leg-piercing icicles for the unwary. Swarms of acidic bore worms. Essentially the same as Canada.

The Romulans causing all the trouble turn out to be fascinating, too. The football jock-type is a former Senator, demoted to Admiral because he didn't agree with expansionism. The head scientist passionately objects to their scheme with the drugged captive pilot, but he knows if he speaks out demotion is the least consequence. Being right is not rewarded on Romulus. Essentially the same as Canada.

The dastardly telepresence drones continue to fly circles around Enterprise. But the answer lies in the frozen hearts of "The Aenar": an endangered Andorian Goth subculture. Jhamel (sister of the Romulan's victim Gareb) is a brave volunteer for the countermeasure Trip and Phlox threw together out of old iPads and cake pans. Jhamel reaches her sibling mentally with a boost from the machine.

Gareb, told he was the last Aenar, appalled by his own deadly actions, and completely out of Doritos, turns on his tormentors. Knowing they will kill him for it, Gareb crashes the drones into each other.

Unwilling to explain his reasons, Trip asks for a transfer to Columbia. Phlox knows why: "No species in the galaxy has mastered the art of mixing romance and vocation."

What a great adventure story! Testing the limits of science! Exploration! Trying to understand the other guy! Nearly 40 years since Vulcans and Andorians showed up on TV and it takes this long to get around to a season depicting their home worlds? What fun, though!

Reaching out to communicate solves problems, silence causes more. Yet everyone knows that as a best policy, honesty is risky. After all, the Remans are waiting outside, just as they were in Nemesis: the wolves who show up to drag your carcass away when you're cancelled.

United

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Trip and Reed are shaken like a Polaroid picture aboard the Romulan Remote-Control Drone ship. The nefarious nemesis continue to sow rage and confusion by destroying hapless Rigelians while disguised as Enterprise. Elsewhere, a Romulan agent takes shots at Extreme Cougar Wives while disguised as Honey Boo-Boo.

Archer's plan to catch the wily raptor with a sensor blockade requires the cooperation of a large fleet. Earth doesn't have enough ships, and the Vulcans are disarming to read the scriptures and lie in deck chairs. Still, Andorian ships are plentiful, and Tellarites have some second-hand Xindi Sloth barges whose stench can likely be detected across a vacuum...

However, the Andorian Aphrodite, Talas, was shot while surrendering to the cowardly Tellarite Naarg. Talas' lover Shran pours her blood on the killer's hands, demanding a duel to the death. Captain Archer stands in for the snivelling pig, since to do otherwise would ruin any chance at alliance. Interstellar peace and politics come down to knife-fights rather often in this dimension! And it's a stab-fest between friends, too, so it's pretty intense. Especially the "handcuffed together wielding ceremonial pizza-cutters" part.

Still, we need honour satisfied and Shran and Archer alive, so it turns out that by "Death Match" Andorians mean: "Or Whatever".


Like Buster Bluth piloting a bomber from a mall kiosk, the hand on the tiller is nobody very important. The Romulans won't let any trace of their involvement be proven, so they captured a Pasty Patsy, an Andorian Mole-Man who looks like he's spent the better part of his life in a basement playing video games hopped up on sugar.

"United" offers a sense of the fledgling Federation as a brittle community struggling to respect each other's values. It's a treat!

Babel One

***** (5 stars out of 5)

Apparently only 2.5 million people watched "Babel One", because this was when UPN decided to cancel the series. I will try to refrain from saying (again)... just when it was getting good!

O.K., so I failed. JUST WHEN IT WAS GETTING REALLY GOOD!

If the stiffest complaint that can be laid against this story is that is a lot like 'Journey To Babel' then I must totally agree and say 'bring it on'! This is exactly the derivative pandering pablum I wanted to yum up all along! Provided said pablum is also knowing, funny and surprising.

Tellarites and Andorians standing on the brink of war! Molly Brink standing around in her underpants! Returning with a bang as the Andorian Talas, this soldier gal certainly makes Captain Shran's antennae stand at attention! HOW is he always so grouchy with a GF like that?

Speaking of grouchy, I don't know if I would love a Tellarite friend or co-worker, but these dog-eating, mud-wallowing, stinking, hairy swine bring a pork barrel full of fun to interstellar politics... when they're not adding injury to insult.

Action and tumult ensue- when Reed and Trip explore a nasty ship. Trapped aboard the attacker (which uses advanced holography to mimic multiple hull designs), the humans must make their way to the bridge and find out who's behind all this murderous chicanery...

It's an absolutely BRILLIANT twist ending, perfectly in keeping with established facts, and it's spoiler-y as all hell. But it's way past too late to bother about that. The answer is... NOBODY! There's NOBODY driving!

Cancelled! Still, numbers don't lie. ROMULANS LIE!

Observer Effect

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Shine, little glow worm, glimmer! Powerful disembodied aliens possess Reed and Mayweather to watch what humans do when they die. Like Nagilum only less visually ambitious.

Hoshi and Trip catch a silicon-based virus while snooping around a Klingon latrine (!) Whatever  archeological treasure they hoped to dig up... could it EVER be worth it? Disease symptoms include discussions of previously unsuspected back story. Hoshi has an aikido black belt?? And plays poker??? And was expelled for breaking her commanding officer's arm??? Hoshi??? Meek, withdrawn Hoshi. Fine, I'll accept it, but I think you meant B'Elanna Torres. Also, Hoshi's pattern-sensing genius extends to picking computer-code quarantine locks and going for a feverish wander. "Yeah, she's full of surprises today," says Trip. Surprisingly bad quarantine, too. Even a chair wedged under a door handle would've worked better!

Humans are surprising to the observers, too. The more jaded of the pair of godlike scientists had never in 800 years seen a captain infect himself trying to help. What you get for watching jerks like Cardassians and Klingons, I guess. Or is it just that everyone else sends doctors to heal people?

"Experience compassion for yourself," Archer challenges the observers.

The aliens agree to save lives instead of being jerks, and also start sprucing up for an official first contact with humanity. "That will barely give us 5,000 years to prepare."

"Observer Effect" is a good bottle show, but I'm baffled when The Original Series had better special effects to depict these nostalgic special guest aliens than the modern.